Regression

“After playing all three classic Skate games, this new entry feels like a massive regress. I’ve sunk almost seven hours into it, and the red flags are glaring. The loot box system is truly awful—you’re forced to spend earned credits on a gamble for items you don’t even want. Out of 11 items in a box, only 3 appeal to me; the rest are either overly childish or ideologically forced LGBTQ content. I don’t care if it exists in the game, but why make everyone forced to get it? You’ll never see Christian symbols pushed this way, yet LGBTQ themes are shoved down players’ throats.

The skating itself is broken. I literally can’t carry speed, can’t Ollie over a 2-foot gap, or even up a small 3-stair. Falling is constant, tripping over anything—even a small curb after a rail feels punishing. The scale and design of obstacles are awful; the church in Gullcrest is nearly unskateable, and the skatepark feels like it was designed for a GTA game, not a skate game. Transition skating is frustrating, the camera is permanently zoomed in no matter the settings, and essential tricks like dark slides and hand plants are gone.

They’ve taken away features that used to be standard in every Skate game and replaced them with microtransactions and a day-one season pass. Normal clothes, normal skate tricks, and core skating fun now feel optional—things you have to pay for or are completely locked behind RNG. It’s honestly hard to keep playing when the game removes everything that used to make skateboarding games enjoyable. Feels like they are making a game centered around selling you back what we loved about the original skate games. Feels like blatant corporate greed.