March 31, 2009 - Black Box dropped a plague on the Tony Hawk franchise back in September 2007 and now they’re back to watch the series take its last gulp of air. The original Skate re-invented the Skateboarding sub-genre by creating the “flick-it” controls; using the right analog stick to flip the board in different directions. It went on to sell double the amount of Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, and even though I’ve been a huge fan for a decade, this amazing sequel solidifies the fact that I made the right choice jumping on the Skate band-wagon.

The fact that the studio hasn’t resorted to rediculous add-ons or unrealistic special moves will make many other frustrated ex-Tony Hawk fans happy they switched too. Black Box simply built off the original, adding many requested features such as larger online maps, co-op play, hand-plants, hippy jumps, and the big one—the ability to walk. The years of in-your-face product placement (including shameless self promotion) and adding the natas spin as a feature to a video game are over.

Skate 2 owes a lot of its success to new level design, which has vastly improved simply because the developers have since learned what works and doesn’t work with the flick-it control scheme and the related physics. This sequel starts five years after the original, and for lack of a better idea, the story starts just as you are getting off a jail sentence. San Vanelona has also mysteriously undergone massive reconstructive surgery due to some unknown disaster. Some mega-company, the properly named Mongocorp, won the bid to rebuild the cherished skate city and has put hundreds of annoying security guards and skate-stoppers on the property to protect their investment. Your mission is to rebuild your career and revive San Van’s skate scene.

In order to succeed you’ve got a much larger repertoire of tricks at your disposal. But unless directly asked to do many of these additions, you won’t find yourself using any of them that often. Things like footplants and hippy jumps don’t tend to be beneficial to keeping a high-scoring line rolling or even to keeping your forward momentum. They are nice to try out, and definitely add some variability to trick based goals, but you won’t find yourself relying on them that often. If you are a veteran to the series, you’ll find the game relies a little more heavily on vert than on street, but mainly the skillset is the same, which felt fine to me as I never felt bored with the gameplay.

Never being bored and never being frustrated are two completely different things though. In Skate 2 you have evolved to finally get those sneakers off the board and onto flat ground. This allows for adjusting rails, ramps, and boxes to create new lines to skate. Goals that rely on this concept and then ask you to do specific tasks such as air up from a placed quarter pipe and hand plant the backboard of a basketball net, will take dozens of fruitless attempts and repositioning. Fortunately there aren’t too many goals that require you to do this type of set-up.

There’s much to be said about the fluidity of Skate 2. Jumping online and back off again is extremely fluid with the use of an Xbox live in-game menu. You can jump into a game of Jam (most points in a round) or some co-op missions with a friend and then come back to your career in the exact same spot as when you left, no magical warping to the nearest subway stop required. Session markers remember where you placed a couple objects and screw them in place until you start modifying objects in other locations (and start a new session marker). You can also open up the session within the Create-a-Spot editor to share it with friends by uploading it to EA Online. This editor seems quite limited, as you cannot just add objects to increase the ‘skatability’, you simply share the setup by setting the zone and scoring as high as you can on the objects. Generally the in-game spots are much more fun to take a run at. When you attempt to beat the high-scores on the in-game spots, you can ‘own’ it, ‘kill’ it, and then try to beat your buddies uploaded scores as a bonus.