The original Skate, released in late 2007, rejuvenated the skateboarding game genre, with brilliant new controls. Whilst Skate had it flaws, it was still great fun to play. Skate 2 takes you back to San Vanelona (the city from Skate 1), albeit one that has been completely rebuilt. Well, nearly completely rebuilt – a couple of places will still be recognisable, like Danny Way’s Mega Compound to name one. Asides from those couple of places, the whole city has been rebuilt by a company called Monocorp. Whilst they’ve built a city perfect for skaters, they’re not the biggest skating fans. Monocorp take their dislike of skating to the extreme: just about everywhere you go there will be security guards chasing you and trying to push you off your board.
Skate 2’s story starts off well, with a very slick opening sequence, releasing you from prison and introducing you to all of the real life skaters in the game. After your release, you’re offered the chance to redesign yourself (and so whenever you meet anyone for the rest of the game, they’ll say ‘Dude! You look different!’). After the first hour or so the story takes a back seat, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it is the reason why it takes the back seat that is important – Skate 2 offers you so many challenges at any one time it would really be impossible to keep the story on track. But hey, the advantage of having so many challenges to do at the same time is that you’ll never get bored!
As in Skate 1, you have complete freedom of movement around the city, and that is where you’ll have the most fun – you can now get off your board and do the impossible of walking up steps, which means it is so much easier to create your own ’spots’. Speaking of which, that is another new feature – you can move objects around to create your perfect spot, and then share it online. The diversity of the city you have to skate in means there is so much to do you will never get bored trying to land a jump you’ve made or clear a gap or do a grind. This is where the fun of Skate really is to be found.
The biggest feature of Skate was also its biggest downfall: whilst the control scheme meant Skate was very realistic, using the analogue sticks to do tricks meant that it was very difficult to do specific tricks, something that just about all of the challenges required you to do. Thankfully, there are very few challenges that require you to do specific tricks in Skate 2, although as you might expect, the ones that do require you to do specific tricks are the hardest.
As previously mentioned, Skate offers you a ton of challenges to do, with a lot of diversity in the challenges – from the redicliously fast and furious downhill ‘Deathraces’ to the contests to the photo shoots, if you can’t do something, there will be something else for you to give a go. A couple of the challenges will be ‘no skate zones’ where security is especially tight, and it was highly frustrating when the security came and shoved us off our board, when we couldn’t move as the challenge hadn’t started.
The city of San Vanelona is full of other skaters and pedestrians, as you would expect. Its just a pity that these other skaters have the spacial awareness of dead fish. Some challenges, especially contests, will find you and a lot of other skaters in a very small area. You will probably spend half of these contests crashing into other skaters (or vice versa) as they just don’t know that you are there. They will make no attempt to get out the way or avoid you, they’ll just plough straight into you.
Skate 2 is great fun to play, and an improvement on the game that rejuvenated the skateboarding game. The open world is great fun to play in, and tricks are very easy to pull off. Its a flawed, but essential game to own.
Nometet.com says: 
Xbox 360 version reviewed
