Not Quite Skate

This game so far is a mixed bag of fun and awful. It's fun to skate around San Van, and the world is full of secrets if you're willing to look for them, but the game feels like it was designed for shareholders instead of people interested in skateboarding. The voice acting sounds like it's AI generated, the Shingo and Slappy feel like completely different people than they were in past skate games. The tutorial takes twice the time past skate games took to teach the same things and isn't optional, and the "story" missions take you out of the loop of leveling up areas. Getting new stuff shouldn't require opening packs, especially when those packs don't allow duplicates. The sound balancing is broken, where 70% SFX is loud while 90% Music is a whisper. Tricks don't register correctly, and that makes doing the challenges a pain. Personally I don't mind the multiplayer direction the game is taking, but lag and load times hurt the experience greatly. Overall the best way to describe this game is "Not Skate." If I were to suggest someone who wants to play the Skate series which games to get, this game would be my 5th choice after Skate It. This game desperately needs more development time, and some major rethinking of what it wants to be because at the moment it's gentrified skateboarding with silly ragdolls, and that's not what Skate is.