So the quest began for me to find something that could properly fill the gap. I'd had my eye on "Session" for a while, seeing it garner some fairly positive reviews but with a lot of folk pointing out that the 'sim' bit of the game's subtitle is entirely accurate. No zillion point combos here, but is it any good?
It cropped up in a Sony sale, so I figured it was time to investigate. This late in the game, there are a ton of DLC packs and season passes for it, but I just skipped all those and nabbed the base game for under a tenner, which is my kind of impulse buy price.
The game is developed by various offshoot studios and published by Nacon, and you can almost tell you're going to find a workmanlike experience in anything published by Nacon - they seem to have a knack for attracting developers who know their stuff but are a bit 'lite' on the playtesting side of things.
Rendered in Unreal Engine, it actually looks pretty good with some fine tuning between performance and graphics mode, and various other tweaks you can make to it depending on your hardware.
Like any good skateboarding game it sends you down a route of taking on a few tutorials until you're in the main campaign mode itself. So here's where things started to show early signs of not being great.
Like EA's Skate series, Session does away with hapless button mashing and works the same trick of giving each 'foot' a stick to work with, so your back foot is the left stick and your front foot is the right stick, and vice-versa when you're riding goofy or switch. So far so good, and before long you master the gentle art of guiding your skateboarder around (albeit with some fairly heavy steering meaning it's nigh-on impossible to turn, but we'll get to that later).
Ollies? No problem - holding the right stick down then flicking the left stick up will pop you into the air, or conversely you can hold the left stick up and pop the right stick down for a nollie. Though I tended to find that the game would always misjudge a vertical movement by adding a bit of 'side' to it, causing all sorts of thrills and spills as I realised that you need to be horribly accurate in this game, there's not a smidgeon of room for deviation.
As the game progresses, and once you've gone through the tutorials (never to be seen again, I would DEARLY have loved a game mechanism where you could go back and practice certain moves or tricks), you'll begin to meet other skates around San Francisco and New York who will set you trick challenges and give you access to the bus pass (to fast travel around). Early on the challenges aren't too bad, but then you'll inevitably find the first real annoyance with Session - challenges that you feel like you're pulling off perfectly but JUST WON'T CLEAR! ARRRGHHH! See what I meant about being entirely and wholly accurate to the letter in each challenge? That's what's often demanded here, and that's great if you have some kind of amazing memory for all the stick and button combinations you'll need to learn. I don't - and I often found myself scrambling for my phone to look up YET ANOTHER USELESS TWAT ON YOUTUBE who pretends to have the secret sauce of a particular trick or move, but spends half an hour rambling on about skate culture or what he ate for breakfast before briefly showing you a murky uninformative video of him completing an entirely different trick. Screw those idiots!
The game's in-built trick book is no more helpful. Sure it shows you some of the stick and button combinations but these are presented entirely 'cold' as a big long list of meaningless skateboarding terms, so you're always struggling to find the trick you want - and when you do you won't be able to make sense of what they're asking. UGH!
Like real-life skateboarding, Session also has the kind of ragdoll / falling over model that will drive you utterly crazy. The character falls to the floor like a wet sack of spuds at even the slightest crease in the road or pebble or low kerb or twig or matchstick. And because of the stick / control method, you'll find yourself spasmodically performing the wrong move purely because of that earlier mentioned demand to hit the compass points on the control sticks ALMOST DEAD ON. Any deviation means another fail, but at least you've got quick spawn points so you can retry the trick over, and over, and over again until you get something called "Scrapeitis" and have to rage-quit, because you realise you've been grinding your teeth harder than your skateboarder grinds those kerbs (grinding - ugh don't get me started on that either!)
"Scrapeitis" is a special term I coined back when I bought my first house and had to remove about ten layers worth of wallpaper from a wall in one room. The endless scraping set my teeth on edge, but the job had to be completed, so I would spend DAYS just scraping, soaking, scraping, soaking those walls until I literally could not stand it any more, and had to ask my wife to finish it off for me. I still have nightmares about "Scrapeitis" but I use it to describe certain game mechanisms where you have to try, and try, and try again to do something that seems really obvious and easy but is actually the gaming equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your stomach while on fire and being simultaneously attached by snakes, tigers and a hurricane.
Session is horribly frustrating at times. As I said, no playtesting could have possibly resulted in someone thinking "Yeah, that'll do, that's enjoyable" because that's the crux of it, it's not enjoyable on any level to have a game where progress is a brick wall until you do a particular thing.
Swinging round to the aforementioned grinding. Nearly every single other Skateboarding game features this, and does so in a way that it's almost hypnotic to watch someone hopping their board, grinding a kerb or rail, then hopping off again. In Session you don't get that. You get some weird game mechanic where you have to try and predict which stick to use to 'bind' your skateboarder to a grind surface while trying to simultaneously get up the right amount of speed and the right angle to approach the grindable object, only to watch your skateboarder spazz off again at the last minute. Back to Scrapeitis again. Oh dear.
It's a real shame, because somewhere in Session there is a game, a challenging game that does feel a lot like real-life skateboarding, in that it's going to hurt you more than it causes you moments of euphoria. Being an older gamer I actually physically ached from playing it because it made me so tense and so angry, and if a game does that, can you even CALL it a game?
Weirdly I do want to keep trying to get better at it. Maybe there's a magic 'click' point where it all suddenly gets easier, or maybe there'll be another challenge where you're expected to land three perfect manuals in a row and hop off with a sexy little trick at the end, which is absolutely fucking impossible. Or maybe I'll just consider the 8 quid as a write-off, and wait until someone else produces the perfect Skateboarding game that hits that right balance between enjoyment and challenge. This ain't it though, not by a long chalk. What a pity.
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