Also, even though you're building a new and huge skate company, you never really directly see anyone buying your boards. The filming parts for your team video are similarly empty, with simple goals like "perform any five tricks." The billboards show up around town, but the skate video you're supposedly shooting along the way never seems to surface. Most of the photo goals for your team are simply "take a picture of your skater." It's up to you to decide what the photo looks like, so if you want a shot of your guy standing there, looking dumb, that's totally fine. The idea is solid, but there's little followthrough on the career mode's team concept. As you hit sales milestones, you'll customize more skaters for your team, and some of the goals have you skating as these guys for billboard photos and the ever-present team video. Along with setting up the company, you'll also form a skate team, ostensibly to further promote your line of skateboards. It took me around seven hours to sell a million boards. Once you hit 1,000,000 board sales, the career is effectively complete, though you'll probably have plenty of goals left to try by that point. The game gives you sales targets, you meet those targets by completing challenges, which opens up more challenges. There's still a flashy, well-produced live-action intro sequence, but once the company premise is established, there isn't really much of a story. This time around, you're trying to start your own skateboard company, and each goal you complete translates directly into board sales. Like Skate 2 before it, Skate 3 opens with a huge accident that leaves your skater horrifically mauled, justifying the game's create-a-skater while still essentially putting you in the shoes of the same skater from the previous game.
#SKATE 3 FOR PC REVIEW SERIES#
The gameplay is as sharp as ever, but depending on what keeps you coming back to the series, you might not be as thrilled with the direction in which the series is headed. But that funnel has left the game's story and career feeling stripped and more insignificant than previous Skate career modes. The whole game feels like a big funnel, designed to get players onto Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, where they can mix it up in a ton of different ways. Things like playing games of S-K-A-T-E and forcing you to do extremely specific tricks are practically gone from the game, at least until you set out to start "killing" the game's challenges by performing more than the bare minimum.
At the same time, most of the game's career mode challenges are much easier when compared to the past games in the series. Things like teams and the new online challenge system are things that will keep fans of the series engaged for months to come.
The game has a lot of new online features that feel like they were built to cater to the series' most fanatical supporters. There's a bit of a tug-of-war happening in Skate 3. Thrasher is once again represented for some of the game's photo goals.