Skate was a video game first released back in 2007 that wasn't particularly interested in the waning days of "skate culture", in so much as it had once existed through the lens of the Vans Warped Tour, Jackass and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It was just a game about you, a skateboard and a public space.
Which meant it never achieved the same cultural (or commercial) success of the aforementioned Tony Hawk series, but it never wanted to. If Activision's games were about licensed music and weird costumes and fanciful stages, playing like a combo-obsessed fighting game, Skate was the opposite. It was all about the skating; it gave players a control scheme that felt like a simulation, was immensely satisfying to master and was rewarded with cult status as a result.
Skate did not need to come back. It didn't need any more sequels, or remasters, or remakes, because despite its age it was still perfect, a video game truly representative of its time and place. But the brand carries weight, even after all these years, and publisher Electronic Arts exists these days solely to extract value from the things it owns. So in 2025 we have an all-new Skate game to play, and let me tell you, it fucking sucks.
The game is a marketplace shakedown in search of an audience. It's the Hello Fellow Kids meme stretched over 8.18GB of hard drive space. Its writing sounds like something penned by a marketing intern after four cans of Monster, its premise--that an AI is following you around telling you when you've unlocked a new tanktop in the skate store--closer to something Mark Zuckerberg would demo on a stage than anything you'd associate with skateboarding.
Like just tonally, in terms of letting this run in front of you, it's physically painful to sit through, in a way I haven't experienced since the last time I subjected myself to an NBA 2K career mode. Everyone you meet in this game feels like a theater kid improvising as a serial Linkedin poster. The stages have the sanitised energy of an Olympics breakdancing venue based on a Fortnite map.
I hate everything about it! This game is deeply unpleasant to simply be around, and so the stuff it does do well--it's got blooper potential, the overall controls are similar to the originals and there are some interesting open-world stages where you can pull off some incredible stunts--don't matter. I will not talk about it here and will never explore any of that stuff because I would rather lick the paint off my door than see another lootbox screen or hear a robot tell me to collect my DaKs prize package.
You do not need to play this, you do not need to subject yourself to this, you're better than this! If you need to skate around doing tricks there are plenty of Skate-inspired clones, the original is available for Xbox or, if you're on PC, you know, you could just find a way to play it.
