Session: Skate Sim Review (PS5)

As it happens in the football simulation genre, where FIFA and PES are pretty much the only worthy choices, fans of the skateboarding niche who are particularly searching for realism are often left hoping for more.

This is why Session: Skate Sim rapidly caught the attention of pretty much everybody.

Promising a hardcore skateboarding simulation experience, the new title from Crea-ture Studios is without a doubt intriguing, especially for those who don’t give up easily. And you’ll understand precisely what I mean in the next few paragraphs.

Let’s start with the most important part: Session: Skate Sim isn’t just a skateboarding game, as Crea-ture Studios wanted to provide us with a more complex experience that would essentially include everything a skater would have to do. This involves shopping for equipment from renowned brands in this niche, as well as skate customization and personalization.

I’m not going to talk too much about the customization of the skater because this is rather limited, so without a doubt, this is precisely one of the things that need to be improved fast.

However, getting new equipment is quite an enjoyable and, in many ways, a rewarding experience, especially for people who aren’t new to this world.

Now let’s talk gameplay because this is where all the fun and anger reside.

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If you expect Session: Skate Sim to be easy to master, there’s no doubt you’ll end up terribly disappointed. Crea-ture Studios has turned to a rather unusual yet clever approach to reproduce the experience of an individual on a skateboard.

The dual stick controls on your DualSense controller are assigned to the skater’s feet in a rather unusual way: each stick controls one foot. While on paper this makes a lot of sense because that’s precisely how you can control the skateboard better and make the experience more realistic, mastering this approach is extremely challenging. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see lots of people giving up just because they can’t do even the most basic tricks.

I’m not a professional skater and I don’t even want to be one. My skateboarding days are long gone given I have a kid now, but when it comes to doing the whole thing from my sofa, I still think I have what it takes to do a line without falling.

But as it turns out, I actually don’t, or at least, not as easy as I thought I would. Session: Skate Sim seriously put all my muscle memory to the task, as pressing the right buttons at the right time is extremely challenging. But this is precisely what skateboarding is all about. There’s a lot of exercise involved, and it’s pretty much impossible to complete a trick from the very first attempt. The main benefit here is that you won’t break an arm trying to do it.

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While controlling the skater feels pretty realistic, Session: Skate Sim still feels like a work in progress. The open-world concept is a brilliant idea, but on the other hand, it lacks the details that make it more, well, realistic. The traffic is missing, nobody is walking on the streets, and so on.

When it comes to physics, Session: Skate Sim delivers a mixed experience. While the time you spend on the skateboard is brilliantly reproduced, it all changes completely the moment you fall. If you’re thrown off your board, the player just turns into a pile of hands and feet landing on the ground, and to be honest, there’s absolutely no realism here. You can find a few screenshots in the gallery to better understand how awful the physics are here.

The Good

The Bad

CONCLUSION