Session Preview

I don’t think I’m the only gamer that has a small hole in their heart-piece where skating games used to reside. Growing up with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series as a child, then moving onto the more fluid Skate series, there were many years of disappointment and emptiness without any further titles being announced in either series. Thank goodness for the developers that took on the initiative to fill the board-shaped gap that these previous series had left. Now, with the release of theTony Hawk's Pro Skater+2 remake, and with promise of a new Skate title finally in development, Session instead opts to carve a new path, building on the light simulation aspects of the Skate games, but with a focus on deeper simulation and fresh, intuitive controls.

You may think this is a Nose Manual, but it's really just falling...with style

The control scheme seems to simultaneously be Session’s best selling point and its most polarising feature. Although initially opting to try the Legacy controls (which loosely emulate the control scheme from the Skate series), I ultimately bit the bullet and began to learn the dedicated Session controls. It did take a bit of getting used to, but then I saw the trick possibilities really open up, with moves such as Impossibles or Pressure Flips. After a couple of hours, I was rolling around, busting flip tricks and grinding rails with relative ease. You won’t be able to do any ridiculous 4263x combos in Session, but a simple flip trick to grind combination in this game will give you just as much a sense of accomplishment.

Session doesn’t intend to be an exact Skate copy, so the Legacy controls are still early in development, and more of an added bonus, which means a lot of features and tricks aren’t available whilst using them. If you’re looking for a Skate replacement, it might be best that you wait a little longer.

If you listen hard enough, you can almost hear the distant sounds of ska-punk in this photo

The latest update to the game brings the inclusion of the Career mode, which helps introduce more tricks and mechanics of the game to the player. Thanks to missions provided by real-life skater NPCs such as Daewon Song, as well as characters created specifically for the game, I slowly learnt how to manual, and then progressed further with various flip tricks, and before long felt quite at home with new controls. You’re going to want to put a bit of time into learning the controls and into discovering the more subtle mechanics, but once you do, you’ll be finessing around the streets of New York and Philadelphia like you own the place.

Other new features include new spots to skate, such as the Jerome Avenue Banks, a legendary skating location in The Bronx borough of New York City, four fresh new characters ready for customisation, and the inclusion of new brands in the skateshop, where you can spend all that cash you’ll be racking up by completing Career missions.

Sometimes you hit the rail and, sometimes, the rail hits you

With well designed Unreal Engine environments that provide plenty of versatile opportunities for your skating, Session looks gorgeous, which lends itself well to the Filmer Mode, meaning you’ll be able to get some really fantastic looking clips to showcase off the new line that you’ve finally nailed. The Object Dropper will help you to flex your creativity and breathe fresh air into locations you’ve skated to death.

Although still a little bit rough around the edges, Session has come a long way, establishing itself as a strong contender in its own right for the skate genre. It doesn’t try to imitate the games that came before, forgoing accessibility in favour of deep mechanics that, when mastered, may provide the most satisfying and rewarding skating experience in videogames.