As someone who has been skateboarding for over 2/3 of my life, I am the first to say that skating is not an easy skill. Falling, smashing your shoes with grip tape, and spending weeks trying to land your first kickflip can be challenging and fun, but at the same time hard and time consuming. VR Skater is no exception in that respect. It’s clear that VR skateboarding will never replace the real thing, but how “real” it feels to coast over digital concrete with his bulky PSVR2 headset strapped to his face. I was still skeptical. But after I landed my first kickflip on the tires, all my doubts vanished and I found myself looking forward to mastering my next trick.
If I had to describe VR Skater in one word, it would be ‘challenging’. Intuitive controls and easy-to-follow tutorials help make the skateboarding experience in VR as comfortable as possible, but it still requires a little more skill and practice than other skateboarding games to date. This presentation is clearly inspired by Tony Hawk’s professional skater his game, but don’t expect to fly around the course while accomplishing gravity-defying tricks just yet.
VR Skater starts with a simple tutorial on movement, basic tricks, and then a few smaller challenges like driving between tires and ollie down stairs. Other than pressing X to ollie and lock your landing, you need to control the movement of the board with your hands just like you would with your real feet. This is where the real challenges begin. If you’re used to riding a skateboard, it’s natural to slide your left foot forward on the edge of the board and flip it over. If not, it may take some getting used to the controls as you not only need to push and kick the board properly after an ollie, but you also need to land as solid as you would in the real world. not. . It takes a bit of patience and time to figure out how the game skateboards, but once you do, it’s a rewarding experience that allows you to try new tricks and explore in the few locations you have access to. I’ve found it to be a lot of fun to skate and stuff in preview builds.
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Not everything in this game is smooth skating. Some tricks such as board slides were very hard to master. However, the tutorial was intuitive, explaining how the game wanted you to play so that you could easily pick up all the tricks over time. Boardslide is essentially one of the simplest grinds you can do in real life, but it just never clicked with me. VR Skater can also make the grind a little easier with some accessibility options, such as the ability to snap to objects. A few times I simply couldn’t do a trick because I couldn’t turn the board quickly or was too far from the stairs or benches I wanted to grind. While this is definitely not the end of the world and a problem that can be solved with a little patience and practice, an option to make your skating sessions a little more snappy would go a long way.
The overall presentation of VR Skater closely mimics the best parts of the Tony Hawk and Skate games. The soundtrack is a fine mix of pop punk and hip hop, and the course takes you through developing suburbs, ports with shipping containers and conveniently placed steel beams, and a comical giant in the middle of the desert. Ranging from vertical ramps.
If you inevitably fall in VR Skater, you will immediately respawn somewhere nearby. This was a great way to stay immersed without getting frustrated when you hit a wall or stepped off a rail, but unless you open the menu and set the respawn point manually, you’ll start right where you started. I was frustrated that I couldn’t. . Beyond this, being able to restart the run so quickly after a crash has led to the motivation to try again and again to land something worthy of the highlights of the classic 411 skating his tape.
Like real life skateboarding, VR Skater isn’t for everyone. But after a little trial and error and perseverance, it quickly became one of those rare video games where all the pieces of the puzzle fit right in for me. Its presentation lives up to the legacy pioneered by the Tony Hawk and Skate games, and the intuitively challenging yet rewarding gameplay he loops make this an enjoyable VR experience. The option to offer a little more accessibility and hand-held functionality from the game would be a welcome feature, and its respawn system could take a little more time to cook, but the VR skater is just a nice addition to the game nonetheless. It’s not just anyone’s PSVR game library, but it’s also a great way to experience the most rewarding aspects of skateboarding without worrying about injury.
