Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
What immediately comes to mind when you think of skateboarding video games? If you want to effortlessly pull off super cool tricks, slide down high-speed rails, pull flashy turns off the top of huge vertical ramps, and put together cool combos for amazing scores, then you might just need to hit the brakes of your board. a little before. decide whether or not to connect to the Crea-ture Studios: Skate Sim session.
Where the likes of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series and OlliOlli World have you flying along custom courses and performing big tricks right out of the box, this is an experience that focuses squarely on the simulation aspect. of the sport, making it a game that masters the frustration, repetition, and constant failure it takes to pull off even the simplest tricks on an actual skateboard. It revels in its difficulty and forces you to dig deep and adopt a proper skater mindset if you want to exceed its technical demands, be good at it, and make the most of its diverse urban playgrounds.
The control setup here will take some getting used to for gamers familiar with the arcade-style mechanics found in other skateboarding endeavors, with the left and right feet set to the “Y” and “B” buttons respectively to push. to speed up, as well as being assigned to the left and right thumbsticks to perform tricks. Pull your right stick, then press left on your left stick to crouch, then roll into a heel, for example.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
Turns are done with the left stick or left and right triggers – you’ll also need them to get off the top of jumps – and braking is set to the ‘A’ button. A few tweaks are required, but the controls are quite intuitive and start to make more sense in your head when you have some basic tricks under your belt.
On the one hand you have to give it to Session: Skate Sim, it provides what we assume is a fairly accurate depiction of what it’s like to grab your board and head out onto the unforgiving concrete streets looking of spots to shoot off towers. There are no hand-highlighted routines or staggered ramps to gravitate towards here. You will need to explore your surroundings and make the most of benches, curbs, steps, ramps, etc. realistically placed, then start making your best moves. In terms of a fun gameplay experience, well, it’s all going to come down to your patience and whether or not you’re willing to take the time to start from scratch, master the basics very slowly, and work your way up to a more sophisticated finish. scale
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
That seems good to me. There’s definitely a place for this type of extreme skating sim in the genre (not to mention the sim genre itself) and we can totally see how very rewarding getting stuck here could be as you overcome obstacles and you improve to the point where you begin to dominate their surroundings. At least it would be if it weren’t for the fact that this is a game, and especially in its Switch form, that combines the frustration of failure and repetition with blurry visuals. that make reading the terrain harder than it looks. . Plain urban environments lack any kind of joy or sparkle. Boring quest structures feature a bunch of mute NPC characters who are only good for handing out the next list of tricks to conquer. And then there are the aforementioned controls, which could use a lot more refinement considering how much punishment Session: Skate Sim expects you to endure.
Yes, although we are ready and willing to endure the trials and tribulations required here, it all feels like too many headaches, too much struggle to deal with technical shortcomings and a complete lack of atmosphere. or enthusiasm to keep you coming back for more. The three sandbox playgrounds you need to explore, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, are certainly quite large and offer plenty of room for experimentation, but, and you can see it very easily in our screenshots, in fact, on Switch they’re as low res, blurry and bland as we wanted to explore.
Even excusing the images, there are also mechanical issues and bugs to deal with. You’ll stop at curbs for no reason, you’ll stop when going over gratings, you’ll automatically jump from a crouched position without moving your joystick, and you’ll often see your character fall into the street for no real reason. . Honestly, we spent the first few hours blaming ourselves for a lot of these things, but as we got used to the controls it became clear that there were underlying issues here. Even performing a simple ollie up or down a few steps can be an excruciating procedure when the combination of blurry images and clumsy controls gets in the way.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
Una vez que comienzas a involucrate en cosas más técnicas, podemos ver personas que se dan por vencidas en las primeras stages del tutorial mientras luchan por pasar de los tricks a los manuales que requieren movimientos perfectly precise de los joysticks cuando es tan difícil leer lo que he passes. the screen. We’ve also had issues with some missions designating a small area where they want you to perform a set number of tricks, but don’t record you performing those tricks unless you’re running a specific, unmarked line in the assigned area. It’s very frustrating when you’re already struggling to understand the inputs needed to perform the moves.
On top of that, missions in general tend to be poorly explained and there’s very little way to communicate the moves needed to perform your next list of maneuvers, no way to quickly pick up the required inputs beyond diving into menus and guessing things. These are things that should be on screen at all times in a game as hardcore as this.
There are also a number of experimental features in the options menu that allow you to enable beta-style features that haven’t yet made it into the game itself. But we did find that, for example, turning on pedestrians so that there are people walking through the empty environments, caused a noticeable drop in frame rate in both docked and handheld modes.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
Ultimately, what you have here is a game you have to applaud for its dedication to a very straightforward and unapologetic simulation of the art of skateboarding. We can imagine that playing Session: Skate Sim on a platform that allows for crisp visuals and more responsive controls could be a deeply rewarding experience for gamers who really want to dig in and spend time learning to master what’s on offer. . There’s definitely a place for a no-frills sports simulator, that’s for sure. However, this Switch port is too sloppy, the visuals are muddy, there are control issues, random bugs, and it all gets too difficult to call it really fun.
conclusion
Session: Skate Sim is a serious attempt to recreate the trials and tribulations of real skateboarding that eschews the arcade glitz of other skateboard games in favor of slow, methodical repetition and mastery of your board and your surroundings . Here’s a deep, immersive game for skateboard fans who really want something to bite into – or at least would have been if it weren’t for the blurry visuals, control issues, poor mission design and the frame rate issues that make for an uphill struggle that doesn’t seem worth it in the end. If you’re very patient, you might still find joy here, but it will take a few patches and updates to get this particular port where it needs to be for a full recommendation.