About Skate Park:
I really really hate to give this a No, but I’m in the middle with this game – leaning a bit soundly on No. I’m a long-time player of Tony Hawk and other skateboarding games and, while I really love the concept and overall aesthetic – the gameplay is total trash. On the good side, I love this game’s sense of humor, writing, and soundtrack. Every part of the presentation is charming and gives the kind of semi-serious, semi-silly whimsy you would see in Katamari Damacy (but with birds on boards). Customization options for your little buddy are also extensive and allow you to pick from an impressive number of bird species. You can tell that the developer had a fun concept and decided to run with it as far as it could go. however, that’s where the good parts end. As I said before, I’ve played a lot of skateboarding games in the past – both good and bad – but this one overwhelmingly takes the cake for worst gameplay in a skateboarding game. While I could write quite the long list about what’s going wrong, I’ll summarize the worst points: The game never seems to know the difference between making you do a stall or a grind. Even when you go high-speed at an angle to the lip (which would be a grind in any other skateboarding game), you’re stopped dead in your tracks doing a stall which messes up the entire combo. Ollies in this game try to be clever by including a double jump (since you’re a bird and can fly), but jumping as a whole is so terrible that this mechanic works against you more than for you. I can’t count how many times I try to ollie up to a very low rail, only to be bounced off in the opposite direction for…reasons. I can’t explain why. Speed works very differently in this game. The logic is incomprehensible. I can jump full speed ahead at a platform and suddenly my bird loses so much momentum so quickly that it looks like I hit a floating mass of molasses that slowed me to a crawl. On the ground, things are not much better. You’re fighting against the game to get enough speed to go up a halfpipe and, more often than not, you slowly but surely slide down without ever having reached the top.
