Notes: I've been working on a Mass Effect review for the last few days. Very hard to write. So I've put it on hold and done this instead. It's worth noting that the title of this game is actually spelled "skate." on the box, however I'll just be writing "Skate" all the way through to keep my spellchecker happy. Please leave any comments or advice you may have, I love reading them.

Skate, by EA Black Box, is a sports game that does a lot of things well. It breaks out from the button mashing fury that has been established in it's genre, but is far from perfect, and for an average gamer will provide more that a few controllers broken in fits of rage.

The game starts with a tongue-in-cheek full-motion video sequence of you being hit by a bus whilst skating and taken to hospital. The quirky thing about this video is that all the actors in it are real life skaters, such as Paul Rodriguez playing the careless ambulance driver and Dennis Bussenitz as a rather hapless construction worker. It's about the entire breadth of the story the game has but it's a good enough way to start the game in motion.

Soon enough the game starts asking you questions, and you begin the character creation process. You can pick out a shirt, a hat, some shoes, a pair of pants and customise your face and body to an extent, before being given a quick tutorial and let loose onto the streets of San Vanelona.

Skate's unique control scheme is it's main selling point. In a game like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, you have a button to do an ollie, a button to do flip tricks, a button to do grab tricks, buttons for spins, reverts, grinds, manuals, rolls, slides, making coffee and throwing tomatoes. This always turned the Tony Hawk games into an exercise in button mashing, and if you could move your fingers around the game pad fast enough the games were a synch.

In Skate the controls are dramatically different. On the Xbox360, the left stick controls direction, the right stick controls your feet for ollies and flip tricks, the triggers act as your hands to grab the board, either "X" or "A" are used to push yourself and "B" is used to brake. The controls are simple to get a hold of quickly, but you'll find they have a surprising amount of depth if you put the time into mastering them. There are a wide variety of flips, grabs and grinds to pull off, and putting together lines of tricks is both challenging and fun.

There are a variety of goals types you are given throughout the game. There are photo shoots, where you have to get a certain amount of points in a specific area, games of S.K.A.T.E, which plays out similarly to H.O.R.S.E in basketball, competitions and "jams" where you're competing against other skaters, and filming goals. Filming goals are the most interesting, as there's no specified location that they have to be completed in. You're just given a set of criteria to be met and allowed to start recording anywhere you like, giving you some freedom in how you complete the goal.

The city of San Vanelona is gigantic, and it would easily take a quarter of an hour to get from one end to another. There are numerous points of interest and secluded areas that you'll find can be fun just to see what you can do, but from time to time the map feel like it's padded with bland spots just to space out landmarks.

The game looks good, with the areas in the game being well detailed and nicely textured. Your character animates well and the menus look very stylised, however there are some issues. First, the lighting effects can be inconsistent. It ranges from bloom effects similar to looking directly at a 100-watt light globe to so dark you can't see what's three feet ahead of you. I also saw a couple of problems with shadows; not connecting with their parent object (usually the player), and the modelling of NPC's, cars, and vegetation is horrendous.

Skate does some interesting things with sound. The default setting for the soundtrack is that music is only played in places where NPC's are skating (i.e. popular skate spots) which I thought was a nice touch, but you have the option to have the soundtrack going all the time or not at all if you like. All the sounds of the skateboard sound very real, but the nice touches are what make it special, such as the board sounding different on different surfaces and the faint sound of the wheels spinning when you're in the air. The only really bad thing about the game's sound is the dialogue. The announcer (if you can call him that) will spit out cheesy one-liners every time you fall off the board or see another professional skater. He sounds like a member of the Italian mafia trying to fit in with young peole by saying "dude" and "fresh" a lot. I'm not sure if it's mean to be a joke about the way skaters talk or if it's genuinely bad but either way you'll be wishing for a way to turn him off.

On to what else is bad about the game. The controls are sometimes stubborn. The "flickit" system is snippy about what sort of stick movement constitutes a certain move or not, and in modes where you have to perform a specific trick, this can be very frustrating. The camera can be tedious as well. It's positioned down near your feet most of the time, as if there's a person behind you, also on a skateboard, holding a handycam by their knees. You'll find your characters legs will often get in the way of what you're trying to look at, and you'll crash into stuff you didn't see because of this on a regular basis.

There's some less than subtle advertising around town. It is a skating game, granted, and you expect there to be some real life brands here and there. But it goes a bit far sometimes. When you meet pro skaters in the game you're shown a video detailing the brands of merchandise they use. You get more money when you complete challenges if you're wearing your sponsor's gear. Every so often you'll get calls from photographers or storeowners on your T-Mobile Sidekick. It even goes so far as to have a fully-fledged Adidas store in the financial district of town.

Finally, the game can be incredibly difficult at points, usually because the game is making a ridiculous demand of you. One goal asked me to score 400 points in a jump onto the top of a bus shelter, and the only way I could get up to it was from a tiny raise in the pavement, no taller than the skateboard itself. I have screamed in rage at some of the later filming goals. They're not challenging, they're just a pain in the arse.

At the end of the day, Skate could be summed up as refreshing, but bitter. It's something different than Tony Hawk's Pro Buttonmasher, but it's also close to Call of Duty 4 on veteran in terms of difficulty. My recommendation is Rent it first, and then buy it if you like it.