You are a glass demon tasked with eating seven moons and your skateboard is the only weapon at your disposal.
What Is It? Skate Story is a skating game. Any attempts to define it further than that get confusing pretty quickly, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
On the story front, you find yourself a demon made out of glass who has entered into a contract with the devil which requires you to eat seven moons in exchange for your soul. That is the most straightforward sentence I conjure about the story in this game. It goes in wild, wild directions.
The art and music will immediately stand out once you get going. The entire world looks great. I don’t have the words to describe the style, but it is utterly unique and fun to look at over the course of this 5-7 hour long game. It is a nightmare world where everything appears to be coated in glass. The music is helped by a group called Blood Cultures providing some of the songs.
Weird story, looks and sounds great. Got it, but what is the game?
It’s a more realistic approach to skating than what the Tony Hawk and Skate series provide. The camera is affixed slightly behind and to the side of the skater, barely off the ground. Anybody who has watched a skate video in their life will instantly recognize this as a classic skating angle. It isn’t the best angle to have in a video game, however, as you will find yourself not being able to see important things at times. Hardly a deal-breaker, just a case where the style outweighs the utility in my opinion.
You perform a basic ollie with the press of a button. A small ring shows up when you first press the button, pressing again when a certain part of the ring is highlighted results in a perfect jump, giving a bit of a boost. The basic ollie is altered by pressing shoulder buttons (on consoles) then the ollie button. This allows you to kick/heel flip, pop shuvit, or frontside pop shuvit. There are a few advanced tricks you will learn later, but those are the basics. You can spin, manual, nollie, and grind as well. Grinds are particularly interesting as they require you to actually land properly on a rail and the angle you land will determine what the grind looks like. One cool control feature is that you can “pre-load” your tricks a bit by pressing the requisite shoulder buttons then waiting to press the ollie button. As long as you don’t press anything else (like the “go faster” button), you will pull off the trick you input even a few seconds after doing so.
You chain tricks together not by never stopping, but by making sure you perform them close enough together. The longer you wait, the lower your multiplier drops.
The game has three different playstyles throughout: free skating in an open area, racing through corridors, and boss fights.
Free skating gives you a city block, or two, sized area to explore. You need to do something to unlock the next portion of the game, but the areas are always full of spots to skate and small ways to earn soul points such as smelly weeds to beat down or slugs to swat away.
The corridor sections are typically fast paced, occasionally even timed, where you have to make your way through a series of corridors to reach whatever awaits at the end. Sometimes you need to go through particular gates or jump over obstacles in order to advance, while other times you simply need to not crash.
Finally, boss fights. In a skating game. Wild! You need to build up combos and then “stomp” them while near or underneath a boss to damage them. Do this enough times to defeat them and the move on.
Combine these three different styles over the course of the nine levels and you have Skate Story. The game is rarely difficult, often a simple two move combo is enough to deal big damage to a boss, for example, but some of the corridor parts near the end get a little tough. The game is fully linear and does not let you go back to any prior areas at all. There is no chapter select, so if you want to see an early spot again you’ll need to restart your game.
The Best Part: As a demon made of glass moving swiftly on a skateboard, you will crash a lot and when you crash you will shatter. That shatter is a wonderful animation and sound effect combo that sticks with you after you are done playing. There’s a trophy for crashing a lot (three of them, actually), so you can use that as an excuse to run into walls at full speeds over and over, if you’d like. (The skating is the best part, actually, but I’m spending most of the words in this review discussing that, so I wanted to highlight something else here)
The Worst Part: The story gets weird in ways I was not able to follow. A demon made of glass tasked to eat moons for the devil is a pretty cool synopsis. All of the details along the way are beyond strange. I’m sure it all makes sense to the developer and I hope many, many others are able to find meaning in all of it, but that was not me. This ended up meaning the game was mostly storyless for me. It doesn’t dull any of the fun from the gameplay, but it isn’t quite as rewarding as a story I could really get into.
The Verdict: Skating is hard. Like really, insanely hard. Skating video games to this point, at least the most popular ones, don’t take into account how difficult the sport is. They, instead, aim to enable players to maximize fun by drastically stretching the realm of what’s possible. If you watch the X-Games street competitions the best skaters in the world are putting together runs that would gain them about 10,000 points in a Tony Hawk game. Skating is hard. Skating games make the difficult seem mindless and the impossible seem expected.
Skate Story takes an entirely different approach. The most impressive trick you can do in this game is a double kickflip, treflip, 360 pop shuvit, or something similar. These are a few hundred points in a typical skating game, not enough to earn any accolades whatsoever.
Ignoring everything else this game has going on, this approach to a realistic version of skating is a refreshing take. Tying the tricks to the shoulder buttons requires a tough bit of button-pressing gymnastics that I haven’t needed since PS1 or PS2 games. It, much like realistic skating tricksets, have been trained out of my memory for years. This all results in the most realistic version of “skateboarding is hard” I’ve seen in a video game.
There are some rogue bugs, I fell through the ground and got locked outside of a room along the way, but those are minor and easily moved past. The story is really out there. The game doesn’t let you replay any area, so if you want to see the best combos you can get with the available environment, you have to do so before moving on to the next.
Skate Story, despite the flaws, is absolutely worth a look if a more grounded approach to the sport, along with some slick visuals and banger music appeal to you. Between the skating action, impressive graphical style, and amazing soundtrack, Skate Story has a lot to love, just don’t go in expecting a typical skating video game.
How to Play: PlayStation 5*, Switch 2, PC
*console played on for this review
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