Session: Skate Sim Reviews
Session: Skate Sim is the most authentic skateboarding experience you can get from a video game. Though you will fall down (a lot) and may get frustrated, you will undoubtedly leave this experience with a greater appreciation for skating and the culture that surrounds it.
With a steep learning curve and bland presentation, Session: Skate Sim ends up being a disappointing package for hardcore and casual fans of the genre.
With the presence of multiple pro skaters including Daewon Song and Samarria Brevard, as well as a semi-open world with legendary skate spots like Black Hubbus and FDR Park, Sessions: Skate Sim is a well-written love letter to the sport. While some may feel underwhelmed by the lack of customization and find the controls too difficult to adjust to, players that have a love of skating and are itching to dive into a new skateboarding title will eventually feel right at home.
Session: Skate Sim is a skate simulation that forgets to be a skate game.
Although Session: Skate Sim is a difficult game to get used to, the joy of pulling off tricks far outweighs the frustration. It faithfully recreates skateboarding culture of the 90s, and offers tons of freedom to play however you want.
Session: Skate Sim lives up to its name as it’s certainly the most realistic skateboarding game ever made. However, realistic skateboarding doesn’t always translate to a fun time in the virtual space.
Session is the skating game I've always dreamed someone would make, where performing even a 'simple' trick is significant and challenging. There are no mile-long grinds or 900-degree kickflips here: just real skating in its rawest form. It doesn't just simulate the sport, but the art of skating too. You need to get creative, looking at the everyday clutter of a city and dreaming up ways to make something rad out of it. That's what street skating is all about, and why Session is the best virtual expression of the artform yet.
Session: Skate Sim is unique amongst its peers. Its control scheme, while taking time to master, is massively rewarding. Rolling around the streets and finding your own skating lines is addictively entertaining. It's a shame about the quest system, its overall presentation and some of the rough edges but do I feel Session is a few patches away from greatness.
Session: Skate Sim is not a casual skateboarding game - it's a simulation game designed to give you the closest experience you can get without actually getting on the board.
The mission structure of the game devolves into going to a place, doing a trick or route, strung along by forgettable story dialogue. The missions have a habit of being poorly explained, furthered by being unable to re-read text boxes explaining what you need to do. And rarely do the inputs needed for specific moves get shown during these prompts. For better or worse, Session is a game for the hardcore skater. While its dedication to realism is impressive, the frustration in the early hours is likely to turn most off.
Crea-ture Studios have achieved a great feat by making the most authentic skateboarding game to date, seconded only by going out and practicing kickflips yourself. The physics-based controls are incredibly intuitive and satisfying to learn. There’s a steep learning curve that may put players off but if you stick with it, there’s no other game that does skateboarding as well as this. It’s not without its minor flaws, but look past them and you’ll find a game with endless replayability.
Session Skate Sim is strictly speaking by the long-awaited Skate 4 and not really a spiritual sequel. If it is indeed the simulation of this most advanced discipline on the market, it is exaggeratedly complicated to take in hand and still quite empty, closer to a big nostalgic sandbox game of the early 2000s.
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In contrast, Session feels back-to-front: so unblinkingly focused on the technical side of riding a skateboard that it's overlooked everything that makes rolling around on a board actually fun. There’s plenty of room for skateboarding games less arcadey than anything with a Tony Hawk face on it, but this early version of Session is a bleak, sterile thing, and one that only serves as a painful reminder of my own lack of talent in most physical activities.