Session: Skate Sim Review – Mullen it over

After a couple of dismal years, there’s never been a better time to be a fan of skateboarding video games. The recent Tony Hawk Pro Skater remakes were a brilliant last hurrah for Vicarious Visions, EA has a new Skate in development, and Skater XL is a brilliantly authentic dive into thrasher culture. Enter a (sort of) new kid on the block, in the form of Session: Skate Sim from Crea-ture Studios and Nacon. After a couple of years of early access fine-tuning, it’s now a full game that’s ready to perform some gnarly moves on the streets.

Performing kickflips, rail grinds, and landing a jump feels incredibly satisfying in this authentic skateboarding sim that brings the sport back to reality. But getting to that point where you can confidently pop an Ollie or grab the front of the board without having to worry about shattering your skull on the pavement below? That’s the real challenge here, as Session: Skate Sim is a brutal dive into the world of skateboarding that’ll test your patience with its no-holds-barred gameplay and some annoying jankiness that threatens to derail the process.

Similar to Skater XL, Session: Skate Sim maps all tricks to analogue sticks, requiring you to flick between them to initiate and land your tricks. It requires a precise level of control, and if you can master the system, you’ll be able to take up neurosurgery as a side gig.  To give your muscle memory even more of a headache, turning is reserved for your trigger buttons and adds to the complexity of Session: Skate Sim’s design.

That’s not a bad thing though, and once you get used to it, the challenge becomes a fascinating part of Session: Skate Sim’s design. It’s an admittedly steeper learning curve than the get-on-and-pop-shove-it approach of other skateboarding games, but landing even the mildest of skateboarding tricks can feel remarkably satisfying. Something the game doesn’t tell you though–amongst many other things–is that these controls can be customised to a large degree, allowing you to find your own groove as you align your skater to meet your specific demands.

It’s a strict and unforgiving approach, but the masochism pays off when you finally land that one rail trick after spending a good hour shattering your digital testicles on a brutal safety rail. The game also deserves praise for its sheer variety of locations, each one having a superb level of grimy detail and trick spots that have become enshrined in skateboarding legend. The catch here is that each city and skate park lacks a certain level of dynamism, and with random objects rooted to the ground, even a small pile of newspapers can be deadlier than a face-first trip into a flight of concrete stairs.

There’s also not a lot to do here either. As a sandbox in the most basic sense of the word, you’re largely left to your own devices with only a few obtuse objectives to pursue and zero multiplayer to show off in. This all ties into the overall career mode that features a number of famous skater cameos, but it’s an annoyingly half-baked system that regularly fails to credit tricks once they’ve been performed, and is merciless with its lack of a logbook to help you keep track of what needs to be done.

Tying into the skater culture that permeates every pixel of Session: Skate Sim is an excellent video editor for when you want to capture some highlights of your recent run. Angles, filters, and lenses will have you recording a clip that looks like it was shot on VHS and inserted in a CKY video, although once again you’ll have to figure out everything yourself as the game makes no effort to teach you anything.

Even with several of the gripes listed above, Session: Skate Sim would be a fine alternative to the gravity-defying titles on offer today. But its strongest points meets stiff resistance when you encounter an army of strange bugs that’ll take the wind out of your sails. Session: Skate Sim feels rough when your skater randomly spazzes out, obstacles suddenly throw themselves in front of you, and on-foot navigation results in the environment having a hiccup attack.

I’m not too fond of the soundtrack either, as it sounds like it has been entirely pilfered from a royalty-free Casey Neistat lo-fi tribute website, but at least the actual sounds of skateboarding are pure skateboarding ASMR. Hearing wood scrape, wheels roll on concrete, and the telltale ding of metal on metal is the real music to my ears. Pity about the lack of polish elsewhere.

Session: Skate Sim is out now for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series consoles, and PC.