Session: Skate Sim Review: Prepare To Bail

Without tooting my own horn too much, I was a dab hand at the Tony Hawk’s: Pro Skater Series. Years spent sitting in front of my TV, committing move inputs and level layouts to muscle memory resulted in me mastering each new installment, racking up insane combos, and navigating impossible skate lines with ease. Whilst I never developed the same level of mastery with EA’s much-loved Skate series, it was, again, another skateboarding game to which I dedicated hours and became pretty competent at.

Going into Session: Skate Sim, then, I was quietly confident. Sure, I had heard rumblings of just how difficult crea-ture Studios’ sim-focused effort was supposed to be, but surely my years of muscle memory that I had built up mastering other entries in the genre would count for something, right?

It’s with a heavy heart that I have to say, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Session: Skate Sim humbled me in a way that I haven’t been humbled by a game since the Capra Demon tore me a new one the very first time I played Dark Souls many moons ago. In fact, the Dark Souls reference is quite apt here. I know it has become somewhat tropey at this point to say that  “X game is the Dark Souls of X genre”, but, Session: Skate Sim is so gruelling and unflinching in its difficulty and dedication to being a sim, that I feel no shame in saying that yes, Session: Skate Sim is the Dark Souls of the skateboarding genre.

Forget Everything You Know

“Forget everything you know”. Those are the words I uttered to myself repeatedly after failing to land a basic kickflip in Session: Skate Sim’s tutorial for what must have been the twentieth time. If like me, you have years of experience built up with the genre, then, in all honesty, that may be more of a hindrance than a help as you struggle to wrap your head around the completely alien control scheme.

To be fair to the developers, my lack of ability is totally on me rather than any fault with the controls. Going down the sim route has led them to come up with what is, on paper at least, a genius move that sees each analog stick responsible for controlling your skater’s left and right foot respectively. With the left analog stick occupied with controlling the left foot, that leaves the triggers responsible for shifting your weight left and right to turn accordingly. Pulling off tricks then becomes a matter of using a mixture of sticks and triggers to manipulate the player’s weight and legs, causing the board to shift accordingly. Whereas the games I grew up on focused on memorizing button inputs and combos, Session: Skate Sim demands you pay attention to the physics and body position of your skater on the screen.

It does begin to make sense eventually, and you will at some point start thinking of your sticks as feet, which will allow you to process which way you need to move them in order to get your board to move as desired. Having said that, I’d be lying if I said that even now after a dozen or so hours I felt comfortable with the controls. That’s not to say that’s a bad thing necessarily. In fact, presenting even the most basic of tricks as insurmountable tasks that require hours of playtime to master lends itself to a highly rewarding experience. Many screams of delight left my body as I successfully landed a kickflip for the first time, accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction that not even my craziest Tony Hawk’s: Pro Skater 3 combos were able to elicit from me. It’s a game of baby steps; hours of frustration punctuated by little moments of progress, and for that reason, I see many people ditching it immediately, such is the human desire for instant results. Stick with it though, and you will be rewarded. That ollie will soon become a kickflip, that kickflip soon becomes a kickflip into a grind down a daunting handrail on a staircase, and so on it goes. As an experience designed to capture the real journey of learning to skateboard (although bear in mind, this is coming from someone who ditched skating in his mid-teens), Session: Skate Sim largely succeeds.

Hit The Streets

I say largely succeeds, as, whilst the skateboarding itself is rewarding, the career mode that underpins your progress through Session: Skate Sim isn’t quite as inspired.

Spanning three cities, New York, Philidelphia, and San Francisco, players are tasked with creating their own skater and making their way across each city, picking up missions across the various levels that each city contains. Each mission typically boils down to pulling off certain tricks or lines in specific spots, a structure I fatigued with fairly early on. It’s not that the structure is bad as such, but the levels themselves, whilst designed well for skating, just feel completely empty of life. This isn’t helped by the fact that the guest skaters brought in to hand out missions are all voiceless NPCs. The soundtrack is equally dull, which I found hugely disappointing given how integral a part of skater culture music has been over the years. It’s a shame that with the efforts made in order to present players with an authentic skateboarding experience when on the board, the rest of the package is so lacking in terms of character and passion.

Is This Still Early Access?

The career mode also shines a light on just how janky Session: Skate Sim can be, to the extent that it feels like a product that wasn’t quite ready to leave early access.

Certain tricks fail to register when completing missions, which is an absolute sin when the experience already demands so much of the player. There’s nothing more frustrating than perfectly landing a trick as required by your objective, only for the game to screw you over and force you to endure the same hardship all over again. It’s also plagued by graphical glitches and awkward animations, and I fully expect there to be a trend of YouTube videos dedicated to showing off just how hilariously awful Session: Skate Sim’s bails and failed tricks can look in places. I’m sure this stuff will be patched with time, but at the moment, the sub-par optimization just contributes further to my hesitance in recommending Session: Skate Sim to anyone but the most passionate of skate fans who will embrace the core challenge, which is really the only appeal on offer right now.

Conclusion

Session: Skate Sim is a game of two halves at the moment. It presents a daunting, yet rewarding challenge that genuinely tries to move the genre forward through its dedication to being an authentic sim, but at the same time lacks the character and anarchy that the genre and skateboarding, in general, are synonymous with. Add onto that a healthy serving of jank and bugs, and Session: Skate Sim becomes a hard sell. However, if you can look past its flaws and are down for a challenge, it’s worth giving a shot as the innovations it does present are worth experiencing, and the highs you will receive from mastering the complex controls are unlike anything else the genre has to offer.

Final Verdict: 2.5/5

Available On: PS5 (reviewed), PS4, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox One, PC; Publisher: Nacon; Developer: crea-ture Studios Inc.; Released: 22 September, 2022; Players: 1; ESRB: T for Teen; MSRP: $59.99

Full Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher.