Skate is the first game to capture the essence of what Skateboarding is all about.
That's not to say that Skate is so realistic that it's boring-- it's only realistic to a point. You'll still be able to fall 30 feet on your ass and skate away as if nothing happened. When you take a really hard fall this Skeleton chart will appear and it will show you what kind of damage you've done to yourself such as bruising, spraining or braking your bones.
You can even save screenshots and/or videos of your coolest moments and share them online via EA's official Skate website. It's not however just a simple replay because you can edit your footage however you see fit. You can use fast motion, slow motion, change up the camera angles, inverting the colors, and much more.You'll probably want to use the replay feature because you'll inevitably come across an awesome moment that you'll want to see again.
These awesome moments are made possible due to Skate's solid gameplay. Part of what makes Skate as good as it is would be the controls. As opposed to Tony Hawk games' button mashing gameplay, Skate has you using both analog sticks. The left stick controls your body and the right stick controls your board. To do a basic trick like an ollie you'll have to hold the right analog stick down to crouch and then flick it upwards to ollie. To do fliptricks you'll be doing combinations of holding the right stick down and flicking it in different directions. For example, flicking the stick down and then to the side will result in a Pop Shuvit. You can do manuals by holding the right stick slightly up or down which will continue your string of tricks over flat ground.
You can also do grab tricks by using the left and right triggers in conjunction with the right stick to pull off different grabs. In order to do a grind you'll have to ride towards a rail/ledge at the correct angle, time your ollie correctly, and land on whatever rail/ledge you were moving towards. There is no grind button. Grinding is definitely the most satisfying part of the game, in my opinion
A large part of what you'll be doing in Skate is getting coverage so that you can appear on Thrasher and The Skateboarding magazine. Challenges include "owning the spot" which is beating a pre-determined score in a very small space (such as getting 2,000 points jumping down a staircase), Film goals that require you to do all the specified tricks within a short amount of time, and more.
Skate maintains a consistently smooth frame-rate, the environments are varied and the trick animations are superb. Other skateboarding games have puppet-like animations in comparison.
To compliment the graphics is Skate's quality sound. The sound of your board coming to a screeching halt after coming down a steep hill is excellent, along with all the other sound effects you'd expect from a Skateboarding game. The Soundtrack is merely average. There are definitely some great tracks like "Psycho Therapy" by the Ramones, "Raining Blood" by Slayer, "Hate Crew Deathroll" by Children of Bodom and "Hustlin" by Rick Ross. Beyond those songs there are just generic rap and rock songs that are forgettable.
So should you buy Skate? that depends on how much you'll play offline because the online play is almost not even worth mentioning because it lags so bad that it's unplayable. If you're the kind of person that'll rush through Skate once and never play it again then no-- Skate isn't for you. If you're the kind of person who'll spend a lot of time just exploring and recording footage of yourself then yes, I think you'll enjoy it enough to warrant a purchase. Thanks for reading.