Recent reviews by CAT9

6 months and we get 2 maps and a battle pass. New gamemode you have to play is an RNG crock of ♥♥♥♥!

Disgruntled thumbs up. In some ways its the best skateboarding game out there, in others its missing things that even the Tony Hawk games had. It's obvious that the publishing deal with Nacon brought with it a classic early access rushed "1.0 Release Date," but its one of the only games I know that actually has lost features upon release, with Impossibles broken, Smiths/Feebles hard to register, and grabs completely removed. This game still doesn't feel complete, and falls right in line with all the other 'open-world tweaked unreal engine sandboxes reliant on community content' games out there, feeling somewhat more like a nice game-toy to record skate clips in. It's really disappointing to see after Skater XL also 'released' in a similar manner while Session supposedly 'took its time'. While it's the best controlling skateboard game out there, making it hard to return to Skater XL or Skate 3 without feeling super off, there's still basic issues that need to be figured out.

If I play a skateboarding game, I'd rather not feel like I'm sitting inside getting better at the game when I could be out improving in real life, and I want to do things I don't have the resources to do in real life. So it is pretty disappointing to see this game reach 1.0 without fully implemented grabs, vert, lip tricks, camera tutorials... A lot of changes introduced at 'release' completely broke existing features like impossibles, smith/feeble grinds and double flips. I still don't feel like I'm as good in the current update as I was before they redid the physics, and the classic skate game issue still arises where it feel like it can be easier to fling harder tricks than land simpler ones.

There's a weird sort of divide in the content available, with 3 cities, usually with a couple of sub-maps, mostly in New York. It is all very street focused, and even the more transition-based maps are 'cool' parks that would be respectable in a skate part. These maps are all beautiful and incredibly detailed with tons of possibilities, but there's just not a lot of pure parks, besides fighting the physics and hoping for the best in FDR, unless you want to spend an additional CAD17.49 for skatepark DLC. That's pretty expensive for any map pack. I'm sure the publishing deal had something to do with it, but how hard is it to get a half pipe or vert park properly scaled to the current physics? Maybe the DLC has it. I don't know, I bought the game before launch and I don't want to spend almost 20 Canadian dollars to make up for less maps than the competition. Even if we've got to stick to the real life locations, I'm frothing at a Kona or a Marseille.

This game does have a modding community, but something like racing games or source engine titles will have literally decades of player created modifications behind them, whereas there's just not a lot of high quality Session mods out there right now. Community maps will especially pale in comparison to the scale and detail of the official ones unless they've just been ripped straight from Skater XL, who at least has decent mod tools and you don't need a third party launcher to play community maps or break the basegame in doing so.

Pick it up if you're the sort of person who buys every 3D skateboarding game already, otherwise you're probably going to benefit from waiting. It is incomplete and a hard recommendation, but also one of my most frequently played games.

If you weren't there, and you didn't get to experience it, it just doesn't make sense to start now.

Something about this game feels like nothing else in a market that's been crowded for decades. This thing better win a lot of awards for sound design alone.

As each year goes on and all sorts of software and hardware get released, the classic "doom clone" gameplay style ages greatly, but it gets an awful lot harder to run the games on Windows 11 with an Extra-Ultrawide Monitor, an RTX 3080 and the 5000 drivers you have installed. Which is why it's such a relief to have a fully modern compatible game like this. Don't think this is just some kind of doom ripoff, though. It is most definitely it's own game, and there's nothing else like it. It's also genuinely terrifying. These Fork Maidens and Possessed Scarecrows give me a huge jump anytime I see one. Overall, I just hope it gets on enough GOTY lists, because if I see it below top 10 on any list they might have a possessed goat problem knocking at their doors.

Best in the series.