Checking out Skater XL for Switch - Preview
Easy Day Studios first kickflipped Skater XL into early access on PC and then with the support of their community, started to shape the game. Once the development was nearly complete, the game was revealed to be coming to consoles, those being Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. But after years of silence on the latter release, many were thinking the game was not happening anymore, that the development had just ollied up and out, but nothing could be further from the truth. After all that waiting, the game was given a release date for December 5th and I recently had the chance to see the game in action and hear from the studio.
As most everyone know the Switch is not as powerful as the other platforms that the game has already released on and when fluid motion is the core of your game, running at anything less than 60fps is just not an option. Dain Hedgpeth, the director of the game and co-founder of the studio explained that the team literally hacked away at the game, in order to trim things down to what it needed in order to run. This meant doing things like taking 16milliseconds from animations, which results in less things to process. All that work meant that the game runs on Switch, just as it does on the other platforms and while visually it doesn’t stand next to them, on the gameplay side it totally does.
Now while you might look at the game and think its just a new game like the Tony Hawk series, Skater XL is a fair bit different, in that there are no preset animations. Each action that you undertake is driven by the placement of your feet, that means ollies, manuals and everything else is based off your actions. That means you don’t have to learn multiple button and stick combinations to pull off a big trick, which is quite a unique concept. The left stick controls the left foot and the right stick controls the right, which can be seen by the colour coded overlay you can enable at anytime. In order to pull of an Ollie, which is considered the most basic of moves, you just need to move the right stick back and then let it go. In the game that action means your foot comes to the back of the board and then slides forward, causing the board to jump. But you won’t need to master every foot position, the game will let you do basics without any real plan, as again its all driven by the games physics engine.
All of the actions you can do shine in the games various locations, I got to see a few of them, such as a school, a skate park and Downtown Los Angeles, all of which felt right for a skating game. The locations are not complicated playgrounds, that are loaded with things to do, much like in real life, locations are not just teaming with countless ramps and half-pipes. Thankfully there is a location that is filled with all that, for those who want to try and pull off a few 720 or 900 degree moves. At any point as well, you can just grab the board, to do some additional moves, so its not all jumps and kicks. You can grab the board at any point as well, so you can pre-grab before you jump, once you are in the air or even as you are coming down. So while you have a few locations to choose from here, the game offers a lot more, as the Switch release does also include mod support, something that is a major part of the series.
As we all know, Switch games tend not to get all aspects of larger games, sometimes its no cross-play, or the online player count maybe capped. When console games get mod support, Switch is usually ignored, sometimes its due to memory, so having so many running at once wouldn’t work, but they never give a big reason. That is not the case here, as Easy Day Studios they decided at the outset not to chop content from the game, or set a restriction on what would be included. As the game was announced with the other consoles, but didn’t launch with them, the team were able to take their time to make sure mods were working as intended. As I said before, the game is feature complete to the other platforms, which means mod support is here and the entire game is supported by mod.io. Thankfully one area that you won’t have to worry about is mod curation, as the team have gone through and taken mod maps and optimised them, even for the other consoles, and bringing them there. It won’t just be maps either, there will be gear and the full suite of content that exists elsewhere, even the stuff that isn’t curated. Sadly mods won’t be there on day one, but will arrive soon after via an update, but that just means you have time to master the board, before you hit new locations.
Something that I had to know was the music, skating and music are paired together like milo and milk, they are great on their own, but together. The team have put a lot of thought into the games music selection, which other platforms are already enjoying, with a selection of the tracks actually being from some very popular skating videos from early on. Now the songs won’t just be modern pop stuff and then a few old ones, but rather the selection was all about the vibe, fitting into the gameplay and what you are doing. A great example of how that doesn’t work can be found in 2021’s Guardians of the Galaxy from Square Enix, that game was tied to music and one song was Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. The game and song are both fantastic, but together they didn’t fit in quite as well as maybe they were hoping for, at least for me, so getting songs that fit the vibe is crucial and it seems that the team at Easy Day Studios have understood that.
The game also offers up multiplayer, which is kind of important for any modern sports title but while you won’t be spelling out H.O.R.S.E. anytime soon, you can kick it with friends. You can even use the replay feature while playing together, meaning one player can do the line and the other one can become a camera man, grabbing that epic shot.
Now while I didn’t get to play the Switch version myself, what I saw gave me a lot of hope that I can lose hours and hours into the game. For some reason lately I have been playing a lot of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 and more skating feels like its going to be right at home for me, even if the general vibe of the two games couldn’t be more different. Seeing the game run at 60 frames per second and at 1080p is great and shows that the team really understand what they needed to deliver. Now we just have to wait for that December 5 release date to come so we can see if the deck is stacked in their favour.
Skater XL is kick flipping onto Switch on December 5th, with local retailers accepting pre-orders for it, there is no eShop listing at this time. It is also available on other platforms today.
