Session: Skate Sim Abandoned Mall (DLC)

I kept a spreadsheet of my failed kickflip attempts in Session: Skate Sim during my first two hours - not because I enjoy pain, but because that's the only way I could convince myself I was making progress. That is the Session experience in a nutshell: patience rewarded brutally slowly, but rewarded in a way no other skating game manages. This is not Tony Hawk. There is no combo meter, no score multiplier, no glowing rails pointing you toward the next objective. The dual-stick control scheme maps each analog stick to one of your feet, meaning even a basic ollie requires pulling one stick back and flicking the other forward with the right timing and pressure. It is punishing by design, and the game explicitly warns you about incoming frustration before you even hit the main menu. Once the controls start to click - and they do, eventually - the depth becomes genuinely impressive. Angle, speed, weight distribution, and timing all feed into a physics model that makes connecting a flip trick into a grind on a rail feel like an actual achievement rather than a button prompt reward. There are four difficulty settings plus a deep options menu that lets you tune individual parameters: rail magnetism, release timing, darkslide and casper slide behavior. Sim purists can crank everything to its harshest setting; players who want a more accessible entry point can soften the physics without killing the feel entirely. That flexibility is smart design. The world itself gives you New York City spots like Black Hubbas and the Brooklyn Banks, FDR Park in Philadelphia, and post-launch maps including Paris, all rendered in a deliberately grungy, fish-eye aesthetic that suits the 1990s street-skating vibe. Real pro skaters including Daewon Song and Samarria Brevard appear, and branded gear from companies like Fallen, GrindKing, and Zero is unlockable through play. The weaknesses are real and worth naming. Visually the game is unambitious - environments read as functional rather than lively, and some NPC behavior is rough. Bug reports, including character clipping and occasional respawn glitches, have been a recurring thread in community feedback since launch, though crea-ture Studios has been actively patching since release and the Steam player base sits at a Very Positive overall rating. The story framing is thin: NPCs hand out trick lists and you execute them to build street cred with sponsors. Anyone expecting a narrative arc will be disappointed. The in-game video editor, however, is a genuine highlight - a 1990s fisheye filter and full camera control let you build a skate clip from scratch inside the game, which scratches a specific creative itch that no other game in the genre touches. As a sim specialist, my honest read is this: Session rewards the same mindset as a deep strategy game. You read the terrain, you plan a line, you execute it poorly twenty times, then you refine the inputs until the sequence locks in. The satisfaction is proportional to the difficulty, and the difficulty is very real. Casual players who want instant gratification should look elsewhere. Skaters - real or lapsed - and anyone with genuine tolerance for a steep mastery curve will find something here that the EA Skate series never quite delivered.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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