The following review is based off the Xbox 360 version of Skate.

AMN's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
Skate, developed by Black Box and published by Electronic Arts, is perhaps the most realistic skateboarding game yet. Whereas the Tony Hawk games have always been very out-of-this-world and over-the-top, Skate's the opposite. It's down-to-earth and more realistic to what happens when you hop onto a board attached to four wheels and roll across pavement. The game's single-player mode is the star of the show, but it does support both up-to-four-player local play and online play via Xbox Live.

What's Hot
What immediately sets Skate apart from most skateboarding games (other than Tony Hawk) is that it's good. The thing that makes it different from Tony Hawk, though, is its more realistic portrayal of skateboarding. Black Box has translated the extreme sport into a fairly realistic video game adaptation quite well. An integral part of why this is true is the innovative Flickit control scheme, which uses the analog stick for all flip tricks rather than traditional button presses, hence the name "Flickit." Rather than pressing, say, X to kickflip, you simply move the analog in the same manner you would your feet as if you were standing on a real-life skateboard. This quickly becomes intuitive and quite frankly more fun than regular-old button presses.

The open-world design in Skate makes it entertaining enough to play even if you choose to ignore the challenges scattered throughout it. Whether you're trying to master a flip trick, grind a stair rail or set a new record for the longest manual, Skate is a lot of fun. This is because of the open-world design, which encompasses several distinct areas, including a San Francisco suburb with steep hills and a downtown district with plenty of stairs and curbs to grind.

Visually speaking, Skate looks great. It's neither realistic nor cartoonish, but instead employs heavily stylized visuals. The entire game is played from the perspective of a camera guy, who follows you throughout the city. This means the camera bobs up and down and moves back and forth as the camera man does his best to keep up with you. The style works extremely well.

Finally, Skate's entire presentation is top-notch. From the paper cut-out-style menus to the T-mobile Sidekick you carry around that controls music options, everything just looks great.

Oh, and the Xbox Live freeskating rocks.

What's Not
Once the novelty of Skate's Flickit control scheme wears off, you're left with what's essentially a more realistic version of Tony Hawk. It's a skateboarding game at the end of the day, and how long that'll entertain you is based totally on how much you're into skateboarding.

We love the Flickit control scheme and wouldn't want Skate any other way. However, it's not perfect. Some of the tricks you're challenged to do by the various NPCs that inhabit the world of Skate require precision with the analog stick that can be incredibly difficult to achieve. Also, while there are a lot of flip tricks, flatland tricks (like the kasper) are sorely missing.

Unlike the upcoming Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, you're for all extensive purposes glued to your board, which means you can't get off it and walk around. It would have been a nice option if you could step off the board and explore the city by foot. This would have been especially helpful when trying to set up tricks, and it would have eliminated frustrating situations where you can't quickly or easily maneuver your skater where you want him to go.


Kittens + skateboards = teh awesome
The challenges aren't wildly original. They never blow you away or ask you to do anything that hasn't been done in any other skateboarding game before. Worse, some of the missions feature pretty vague objectives, so it can be difficult to figure out exactly what it is you're supposed to do.

Even though you can skate from one end of the city to another without seeing a single load time, you're still attacked by them in the menus, after cut-scenes and when you're inside the menu-based shops.

The inclusion of Xbox Live play is a big plus (especially if you're into freeskating), but some of the maps are too small for the set number of players, thus you end up running into others while trying to skate.

Final Word
We could list a bunch of miniscule complaints we have about Skate, but when all is said and done, it's a whole lot of fun to play. This is especially true when you first start playing. Bottom line: the analog stick-based Flickit controls beat the pants off conventional button presses for doing flip tricks. As time goes on, the novelty of it does wear off, though, and Skate begins to feel like just a more realistic version of a Tony Hawk game. This might bother some, but it could be exactly what others are looking for.

Regardless of some small faults, when it gets down to it, if you're at all into skateboarding, you simply have to play Skate.