Published on: 26/05/2021

Skate City Overview

What is Skate City?

Skate City is a side-scrolling Skating game developed by Agens and Room8. Skate City was released May 6th on Apple Arcade, Steam, Epic Games, Nintendo Switch, Playstation and Xbox. You play as a skater performing tricks on the streets of one of three maps: Los Angeles, Oslo or Barcelona. Though the maps are limited, the day/night and weather changes keep your runs somewhat fresh. You’ll perform various tricks to complete challenges, unlock items, skills and race other random skaters. Earn star ratings out of three and unlock more maps and scenarios to explore.

Grinding Gameplay

The gameplay is very straightforward to start. Press “A” to gain speed and flick the left stick in any of eight directions (up, down, left, right, diagonals) to perform an ollie-based trick. Flicking the right stick in any direction will perform the nollie-equivalent trick. Add a few more buttons for grinding, and there’s not much more to learn. From there, you can combine moves for combos and higher scores.

What can become tricky is timing all these moves and combos to complete later levels. It will take a considerable amount of time to perfect them, so making a lot of progress can be truly difficult to the point where you’re playing for several hours, and it becomes more of an annoying and difficult practice routine rather than a fun and challenging skateboard simulator.

You can also customize your low-res character’s skin tone, clothing, skateboard and various accessories to best reflect your ultimate skater. You can also boost some stats under the “skills” option. These include speed, spin, pop and balance, all of which can be boosted five times by spending the SC currency earned through completing challenges.

Good enough to kill a few minutes

The ragdoll physics aren’t anything to brag about (which is something I genuinely love in a skateboard or sport side scroller.) And as laid back as the game is, it’s not something you could play for long stretches of time. The graphics in tandem with the music is relaxing only for short periods but then become repetitive and frustrating.

There’s enough to make you want more, but the “more” that you can work to unlock is too heavily guarded by a massive skill wall. It may seem like I’m critical of the game, but it is just not something I could find myself playing over and over or wanting to come back to after a quick little binge. It’s bad, but the limited options, challenges, and gameplay mechanics are reminiscent of a mobile title, which can grow dull after 15 minutes. If you have some time to kill, but not enough to delve into a campaign story or multiplayer title, this could bide your interest.

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Written by Trevor Forrest