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Review: Skater XL – NWTV

There has been a drought in skate games in recent years. We used to have the beautiful Tony Hawk Pro Skaterseries from Activision and also EA joined them Skategames. While these titles have always been quite popular, we haven’t seen any new ones in years. Easy Day Studios saw this gap in the market and comes up with Skater XL. The game has been in Early Access on PC for a while, but now that the full version is out, you can play it on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One too.

Skater XL focuses on realism. We can immediately report that there is no story, cutscenes or progression in it. It’s all about skating and learning and perfecting tricks. Of course, good and realistic controls are needed and this is one of the strong points of the game. You can see the two sticks as your feet. With this you can control each foot individually in many directions and this forms the basis for many tricks. In addition, you use the triggers to turn and a button to make tempo. This works well and the person on your screen only responds to what you do.

A simple ollie or kickflip will take you a lot of effort to master. The controls are realistic and therefore quite difficult. This is not bad at all, since the pride you feel when you finally learn a new trick is one of the most powerful aspects of it Skater XL is. The progression in the game is completely dependent on you and consists of learning new tricks at new locations. Once you get the hang of something, you can get started editing videos.

Creating and editing your own skate movies is a big aspect of the game. There are a number of well-known locations available where you can skate around and practice tricks. Once you’ve found a nice place to do that one cool trick, it’s time to practice it to perfection. Once you have done what you want on video, you can make a movie of it with beautiful camera angles, effects and slow motions. The game’s graphics are fine, but a bit dated. This will make your videos look cool, but it is not like it looks like it was shot in real life.

Unfortunately Skater XL also a huge downside and that is the lack of content and finishing. The animations are clumsy, especially if you fall. This is a bit disturbing, but having such a focus on realism makes it look all the more strange. In addition, there are about five locations to skate in, but these feel very empty. This way you can skate in the middle of the city, but there is no person, car or other skater around you. The locations have a few cool places to perform tricks, but you’ve seen them all after a while. Everything we mention in this paragraph can be fixed or made better with mods, but so far only the PC version can access it. Console gamers will therefore have a significantly less experience and that is a shame. The developers have said that they also want to bring mods to console in some way and there are already three locations available that have been created by the community, but it remains a significant disadvantage.

skater xl

All in all Skater XL good at what it wants to focus on: precise control, learning realistic tricks and making cool skate videos. Unfortunately, this comes with empty maps, weird animations and generally a lack of content. Despite the fact that we started with the launch version, it still feels like an Early Access version. Skaters who also enjoy gaming will no doubt have a lot of fun with this game, but for the long haul, the developer better have a lot in store to keep the game popular.

For this review, we played Skater XL on PlayStation 4. The game is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. There will also be a Nintendo Switch version later.

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