SkateBIRD (Switch eShop) Review | Nintendo Life

The game of skateboarding, as a genre, has been little explored. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater defined him so delicately in 1999 that there has been little room for improvement, as evidenced by the continued appeal of that first game two decades later. But considering how much it has in common with a 3D platformer – open environments with an emphasis on acrobatic exploration and discovery – there is surely an opportunity for others to try some new ideas.

Enter SkateBIRD, the game that answers the question, “What if Tony Hawk was a tiny hawk?” Whoever asked that question lightly probably wasn’t expecting an answer in the form of a video game released several years later, but here it is.

There’s a sense of fun to the SkateBIRD concept and it puts a few twists on an idea that otherwise follows the Tony Hawk series very closely. Bird skaters’ wings allow them to double jump with a second ollie in the air, for example, and because they are small, they can skate in tiny environments made of furniture and stationery. What we have here is basically Tony Hawk encounters Micro machines Satisfies New Zealand history.

Clearly SkateBIRD has put in a great deal of love and effort. The skating bird scene is framed by a story of lonely pets whose human “great friend” has started a miserable new job. The environmental storytelling on the first level paints a picture of a person who loses pride in life, who has let his household chores slip due to overwork (but has nonetheless maintained an elaborate skate park of the size of a bird in your bedroom).

The story that unfolds is, of course, absurd, but SkateBIRD knows how silly it is and delivers it with charm. The bird characters look wonderfully silly in their various selectable garments, from fisherman’s hats to 3D glasses, and they move with endearing movements and jerks. The original soundtrack and licensed tunes bring a good vibe to the proceedings, occasionally evoking the series that inspired the game, but mostly keeping things relaxed.

A reasonable facsimile of the Pro Skater game is present and correct, with the same basic set of movements and controls. Your bird can find lines through its miniature environment and match combos with grinds and manuals, building momentum for bigger tricks. In addition to racking up points, you must explore the levels and may face item-gathering challenges, finding well-hidden or hard-to-reach locations as you go.

The bad news is that while the ambition skyrockets, the concept doesn’t exactly land. The potential of the wings to give the formula a boost is not realized, and the second ollie fails to introduce creativity into the trick lines. It really only adds confusion to the visual cues for getting through obstacles when the height of your jump is more difficult to understand. The fantastic idea of ​​real-world mini skate parks fails in practice too, with the inspiration scant after the first level and a rooftop park bringing in little that looks less than the size of a human anyway.

While the game’s fundamentals work, you can navigate, you can do tricks, it’s not as fun as it sounds, and it certainly can’t be compared to the Tony Hawk series, with which comparison is unavoidable. The performance of the air ollie is somewhat inscrutable and it feels irritating to have to perform it. Getting lodged against furniture and getting stuck in corners is frequent and tricky, and your bird is too ready to fall off completely. An element of pinball mayhem would have been preferable in such situations – the rigor of the skill demand is needlessly blatant for such a silly game concept.

Some eminently fixable complaints also put a damper on the fun. Cheat names and scores are not prominently displayed, making combo building feel empty and tricks indistinct, especially when a bird sticking its beak into the board is less identifiable and much more difficult to do. analyze that grip of a human skater. The camera can be unpleasantly jerky, especially when restarting your bird, which is such a repeatable problem it’s infuriating.

The most important problems lie in the design of levels, both in the parks and in the challenges that arise in them. The first level features multiple raised platforms that can be difficult to climb and extremely easy to fall from, which is not a useful introduction to the game. A level spanning multiple roofs could have aided navigation with some visual cues to distinguish the roofs from each other, but is instead identical and confusing.

None of these facts help complete the challenges of the story. Often times these are timed races to collect items that are difficult to find, with slow camera controls and graphic quality reduced to ugly darkness beyond mid-range. Challenges are often best accomplished by slowly falling into the right place – a technical success, rather than a genius achievement.

At an even higher level, the overall structure of the game is laborious. Parks must be unlocked through story mode by completing challenges, and aside from the hard work of completing them, the available challenges are not easily managed or located. There are many modern task management ideas that would have been better: Mario Odyssey’s directions, maps, lists, and suggestions for your power moons; Breath of the Wild’s low-key yet atmospheric quest log, but we only get the most basic achievement checklist, the hidden tasks until the right bird characters show up to hand them out.

conclusion

SkateBIRD is a creative addition to a genre that lacks variety, and its fun concept has clearly been realized with a lot of love. However, despite its potential, the best parts of the concept are underused, and neither the miniature skaters nor the addition of wings provide much to excite. While the main gameplay is functional, the gameplay is not smooth, and the level design and laborious structure always go against fun. To top it all, the rudimentary graphics are unnecessarily blurry. More of a turkey than a pretty boy, then, sadly.