Warning: Session is a hard game and will test your patience. Those aren’t my words; they’re the words of the developer, Creā-ture Studios itself, splashed verbatim on each of Session’s trick list menus. That’s a belated caveat for the presumably bewildered people mining the menus for shreds of advice on how to actually do anything in this diabolically difficult skateboarding sim. With a two-stick control system that flies in the face of generations of muscle memory, Session is a complex but very grounded simulation of street skating that can appear wonderfully authentic when executed well. However, despite the fact that it’s just emerged from several years of early access, it doesn’t quite appear fully ready for release: physics bugs, shonky trick detection, and unfriendly mission design are regular frustrations. Since its debut demo back in late 2017, Session has been previously pegged by some as a spiritual successor to EA’s Skate series. To be honest, it’s not really a great comparison. Session’s stick-based trick controls may sound akin to Skate’s on paper, but the reality is Session’s two-stick system is far more complicated. In fact, the single-stick Skate-like “Legacy” controls Session introduced into its Early Access build back in 2020 have actually been entirely removed in the 1.0 version. Adapting to Session’s two-stick controls is now compulsory.

Bust a Move:
Just like rival 2020 skateboarding sim Skater XL, in Session each thumbstick represents a skater’s corresponding foot, and executing flip tricks and grinds requires precisely finessing each stick like you’re trying to crack into a safe. Turning controls are mapped to the triggers, a mind-melting obstacle that took hours for me to hurdle after decades of that being a job for the left stick – and only compounded by the fact that turning is still mapped to the left stick in Session… when the skater is off the board. Unfortunately there aren’t any grab controls, but even without them I was regularly turning my hands into pretzels trying to make tricks.

This isn’t a bad thing per se; it’s just very challenging. However, the complexity does feel likely to be too much for some, such is the steepness of the learning curve here. I’m not confident that a lot of non-skaters or casual skateboarding fans would stick it out to crash through that initial barrier, though Session doesn’t necessarily do itself any favours in that regard. There’s actually a pretty long list of smart gameplay tuning options that can make things noticeably more manageable, but the initial tutorial doesn’t really point any of that out. The most helpful one for me was the option to change the mapping of the sticks from left foot/right foot to front foot/back foot – purists may scoff at this concession, but all the controls being in reverse when riding switch was absolutely cooking my brain. But there are many, many more – pop height, grind alignment, hell, even the gravity can be adjusted. None of this truly turns Session into an arcade skating game, but it can make it a little more friendly.

That said, it is very rewarding – in its own stern way. I’ve once again found myself swept up in the loop of an unforgiving street skating simulation (unfortunately there’s no proper vert skating or grabs) simply because I love to seek out unassuming staircases, ramps, and rails and bust tricks (and presumably digital bones) for no particular reason, until I get bored and move somewhere else.

It should also be said that the list of other places to move is impressively long, with dozens of authentic urban maps and spots of varying sizes spread across three cities: New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. With time of day effects and plenty of grimy, granular detail, the maps look excellent – especially at night, lit by the bright lamp of the chase camera. They are a little static and lifeless, though. For instance, piles of lightweight cardboard boxes and wheeled shopping carts are rooted to the ground and completely non-interactive, and there are no moving vehicles despite being set in the hearts of three of the most bustling cities in the US. Also, while NPC pedestrians can be turned on – an “experimental” option Creā-ture has partially buried in a menu for unfinished features – there are no NPC skaters to add a bit of atmosphere.

Trick Tok

Creā-ture has put plenty of work into Session’s replay editor, and it can produce genuinely great clips. There’s an impressive assortment of camera types and filters available to create some properly cool skate videos with Session’s tools, although it really makes zero effort to teach you how to use them.

Unlike Skater XL, Session boasts an actual career mode, with tasks assigned by guest pro skaters scattered throughout the maps. Despite the fact most of the enjoyment I gleaned from Session’s skateboarding sandbox came from simply coasting around the maps and making my own fun, there is something to be said about having some overt objectives to conquer, especially since there’s no multiplayer. These objectives are not always particularly well explained, though, and instructions can’t be repeated if you miss something. This makes for some really annoying moments if you miss a tip, or forget it after returning later, because the mission log text doesn’t explain any extra criteria. It also has an annoying habit of sometimes not crediting the tricks it wants us to complete, even if it appears we’ve pulled them off. One early challenge to manual across a pad refused to detect the required manual despite multiple attempts. It adds a second layer of trial and error on top of an experience that is entirely built on trial and error, and it isn’t welcome. Turning on the trick names is a slight help (Session has trick names off by default) but it doesn’t solve everything.

This is actually part of a whole layer of weird bugs that undermine Session overall, from sudden and inexplicable bails on flat surfaces to ugly board clipping, and janky on-foot navigation (especially ascending and descending stairs) to seriously odd moments of limb spaghettification, like your skater is about to be sucked through a black hole. These are a real shame considering some of the awesome attention to detail elsewhere. For instance, I really love how the boards themselves slowly accumulate realistic wear and tear as we thrash them with grinds, and the sound design is genuinely excellent. There’s a wealth of subtly different audio cues for every situation, and everything from the hiss of free-spinning wheels to the clunk of steel on steel sounds spot-on. The soundtrack is a bit downtempo and dreary, though; Creā-ture has pitched Session as a tribute to the golden era of ’90s skateboarding but there’s nothing about the fistfuls of 21st century chillhop here that helps makes it sound like one.

Verdict

Session may be reminiscent of the similarly hardcore 2020 skateboarding simulation, Skater XL, but it picks up where its rival stalled by arriving with a far more substantial map selection, plus a simple campaign that stitches it all together. I also can’t deny the addictive charm of seeking out a spot and having dozens of attempts at sticking a slick trick sequence, for no other reason than it looks cool as hell when you nail it. Despite its unfinished feel and the unflinching precision it requires to play, I really am finding it rewarding and relaxing. However, while Creā-ture Studios’ unapologetically difficult-to-master ode to skateboarding is packed with a palpable love for the sport, it’s also packed with a few too many frustrating bugs – and its unsympathetic tutorial and mission design severely undermines its approachability.

EA’s official Skate FAQ is very clear about what 2025’s new early access iteration represents for the series as a whole. “This isn’t a sequel, remake, or a remaster,” states the brief explanation. “It’s the evolution of the Skate franchise.” The first part I wholeheartedly agree with. This is not Skate 4, and it certainly isn’t a remake of the originals by any stretch of the imagination. The second part is not entirely untrue either: It is an evolution, of sorts. That is, it’s certainly changed. A lot. Unfortunately, this means this new version of Skate bears little semblance to the late-2000s originals I love – and I’m currently finding it impossible to warm to its sanitised, homogenised, and monetised reinvention. Yes, Skate has evolved dramatically, but it’s done so to blend into its free-to-play, service game-dominated surroundings – like moths in the sooty cities of the British Industrial Revolution. I don’t think I’ve ever compared a game to an insect before, but perhaps it makes sense when I find it this repellant. Before I get too deep into why it’s offputting, there are a couple of true strengths that I can identify in Skate’s early access launch – the first of which are the sound effects. When it comes to capturing the nuanced array of skateboarding sounds – the hiss of spinning wheels, the friction of plywood on varied surfaces, and the clink of metal on metal – the team has done a terrific job. Ignoring the music and dialogue (which I’ll discuss later), Skate absolutely nails its sounds. This stuff is the symphony of skateboarding and, when you’re in a real flow, there’s an almost meditative rhythm to it. The pops and pings, the scrapes and squeaks – these sounds are just soothing, and I don’t know how else to explain it.

It must also be established that the feel of Skate, when you’re on a board at least, is still supreme. I adore the wild, arcade wackiness of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – and I respect the punishing, twin-stick precision required by the likes of skate sims like Session – but Skate’s controls are my jam. Just about everything I crave is wrapped up in its approachable yet deceptively deep system. Tricks on the right stick, turning on the left, grabs on the triggers, and grinds on… how good you are at lining them up. There’s a lot of depth to unlock once you get the hang of it.

The feel of Skate, when you’re on a board at least, is still supreme.

Now, the new Skate doesn’t quite look and feel identical to the older games. Turning appears a little stiffer, and probably lacks a bit of the more pronounced and organic lean from the early Skate games. The grind assist is also considerably too sticky by default, and there’s definitely jankiness present in the transition skating; I’m experimenting with the pump settings but haven’t quite cracked a consistent solution to always getting the momentum I want and not getting randomly bogged down. Skitching is absent, and there are other missing tricks. Overall, however, it’s entirely familiar enough to be instantly intuitive to me as a returning player. At a minimum, Skate has done a fine job of reconstructing that buttery, legacy street skating feel from the original games. That’s an important thing to bring back if you’re going to use the classic name. Unfortunately, that’s all it brought back.

Streaming the Cube

Making Skate an exclusively online experience was an immediate and utter mistake. During my first session on the day of its early access launch I was unceremoniously disconnected during a random challenge and kicked out of the map, back to the main menu. The error message here was comically emblematic of my thoughts on the overall situation. Something went wrong? Yes, something certainly went wrong with Skate. But it went wrong long before I started playing.

I am, of course, aware that server problems and queues are typical of day one of a new online game (although I’m still waiting in queues the week after launch). The community has come to accept this compromise as the opposite side of the free-to-play coin. For me, this is uncharted territory. The last time I waited in an online queue I was buying concert tickets, but at least I got seats to Metallica out of it. Skate is giving me no such joy. It does not benefit from being an online-only live service. It has new priorities, like selling $25 clothing ensembles. To pass the downtime I played a bit of the existing Skate trilogy (all of which are parked on my Xbox courtesy of backwards compatibility and will work just fine offline today, tomorrow, and in 10 years time).

In a deeply unfortunate twist, playing the new Skate is regularly just as annoying as not being able to play it. From the get-go it’s evident every shred of the personality of the originals has been ruthlessly and shamelessly cut away in favour of infantilised garbage. Every part of Skate has been corporatised and Disney-fied, from art style to attitude.

Remember the authentic human characters that accompanied your skater as you progressed through the story modes of the old games, who would blurt in sympathy as you tumbled down the dam for the tenth time, breaking every bone in your body? Well, forget anything like that. Your “filmer” in the new Skate is… an AI app, called Vee, who just may be the single worst video game character I’ve ever encountered. Vee’s dialogue is beyond nauseating, and is delivered in a faux-robotic fashion that makes it doubly awful. It’s essentially a simulation of AI slop – like having a friend that only speaks to you like they’re reading the captions on a Tik-Tok video. The low-fi and realistic filmer approach of the old Skate games is greatly missed. In 2025, this could have been emulated easily by just giving us an in-game friend with a phone. Instead, we have an ill-conceived chatbot who regards my successful tricks as, “Algorithmic!”, refuses to stop “edu-skating” me on the fact “footy” means “video footage,” and mines 35-year-old LL Cool J songs for quips even my mum would wince at. “Your female parent said knock those objectives out?” Good grief.

Holy Cow Oh My God

Sadly the “human” cast is no better. They’re saddled with an inauthentic, overwritten script stuffed with cringeworthy sentences no person would ever say aloud, and lines I’m not even sure the voice actors quite understood before reading. Skate’s fascination with the term “skater eyes” (which is inexplicably capitalised in the captions like some kind of proper noun) is simply baffling. It’s referenced with such heavy regularity that it sounds like the name of an in-game function you can personally toggle on and off to highlight particular parts of the environment like Batman’s Detective Vision (like certain things that are automatically covered in a yellow mask during some challenges) but it isn’t. It’s just a hackneyed slang phrase Skate has invented and overuses far beyond the point of parody.

Who says the word “BEEP” instead of cursing, even mildly? Everything that's even a fraction edgy or mature has been masked under layers of corporate coddling, like those soft, squishy curves that stop toddlers from splitting their heads on the corner of the kitchen bench. You can, I guess, mute the dialogue – but that doesn’t make it immune from criticism. Besides, the dialogue is also just one part of a cavalcade of complaints I have about the current state of Skate.

Why was it so important, for instance, to concoct an in-universe explanation for the fact that nobody in Skate’s new city of San Vansterdam can suffer any injuries? Making skaters invincible thanks to the medical miracle of “ImpervaTEK” doesn’t make Skate better; it just feels like it’s here because some suit was worried about the optics of children playing a game where people tossing themselves off buildings might have to be depicted as being seriously hurt. As a result, Skate’s traditional post-wipeout x-rays and bone-snapping sound effects are totally gone (as are bloody scrapes, grime