xLAN - Skate 2

Skate 2 by Cameron
	Genre: Skating Release Date: 23 January 2009 Developer: EA Black Box Publisher: Electronic Arts Rating: M Platform: XBOX360
I must admit that when Skate 2 game came across my desk last week for review I was a little Sceptical. Having not gone through the sk8r boy phase in my past the only Olie I knew was a slightly smelly uncle that lived in Australia. Therefore I didn’t know what to expect when I started the game. Once started however I was hooked – the controls were fairly easy to learn such that you could complete olies, kick flips, nolies, manuals and grind rails with easy by the end of the tutorials. The progressive nature of these tutorials taught you to combine these move into combinations, which in the context of the game gave you more points, but how the points system worked was not really well explained. Although it was easy to learn how to skate this didn’t make the game easy by any means. Completing some of the challenges took me a few attempts to get perfect, and even if you do finish it sometimes you want to do it again to get better photo shots taken.
The world that you skate through is well crafted, giving you many surfaces and jumps to use as you skate between challenges. It’s also very vibrant with cars and pedestrians to avoid and guards that’ll chase you down the road if they can. I didn’t really have enough time to see how the story would develop but there were a number of different challenges that I could partake in to move the story forward – and there in lies the challenge to the game – you can repeat challenges until you’ve passed them, and this allows you to perfect your moves.
	I found the online aspect of the game a little frustrating, there were some definite pauses in game play that made it difficult to enjoy competing with other players. Free skating and issuing challenges to people was about all I was able to achieve. Of course, once I learned about the hall of meat, that you could get “points” for wiping out and breaking bones in style, I spent most of the afternoon finding the highest things to fall off and performing the biggest bails that I could – which for everyone watching seemed to be the most amusing.
My hint for the game, spend some time in the skate parks early on and perfect your complex moves, and make sure you’ve got some spare batteries for the controller cause you’ll want to keep playing like I did.