Skater XL

I went in expecting a skateboarding game and came out with a question: does a brilliantly designed control system alone constitute a game? Skater XL's Independent Foot Control System is the real deal. Each analog stick represents one of your skater's feet, so a kickflip means pulling the right stick to position your back foot, then flicking the left stick to kick the board into a flip. A pop shove-it is a circular motion on the rear-foot stick. Grabs are on the shoulder buttons, rotation on the triggers. It sounds complicated written out, but in practice it clicks fast, and the variation it produces is genuinely impressive - you can throw five heelflips in a row and none of them will look identical. The maps give that system something to work against, and the best of them, Easy Day High School and Downtown LA, are solid playgrounds. There are recognizable skate landmarks folded into Downtown LA, and the replay editor - which lets you position a virtual camera anywhere, including a tripod mode that tracks your skater automatically - can make even a sloppy nosegrind look like it belongs in a real skate video. The visual aesthetic, particularly at sunset lighting, is genuinely good, and the licensed soundtrack (Band of Horses, Modest Mouse, Interpol, Animal Collective) matches the West Coast vibe without feeling forced. Four pro skaters - Tom Asta, Tiago Lemos, Evan Smith, and Brandon Westgate - are playable, plus a customizable default skater. Here is where the honest accounting starts. There is no progression system. The challenges per map are tutorial-grade and unlock nothing. Completing them is a formality, not a goal. The base game shipped with a handful of developer maps and a few community-curated ones, and years after full release that number has not grown meaningfully from Easy Day's side. On PC, an active modding community via the mod.io hub has added maps, physics tweaks, and quality-of-life fixes that the developer never shipped - and community sentiment is blunt that the vanilla game without mods is a thin experience. Transition skating on ramps and bowls is the weakest part of the physics, and the ollie has only two height settings, which looks awkward on low obstacles. The replay editor, while promising, has fiddly button inputs and a trim system that does not always cooperate. The bigger problem heading into 2025 is developer inactivity. Forum discussions have grown pointed about the gap between promised updates and actual delivery. The modding scene remains passionate, but it is carrying weight that the studio should have shouldered. If you are on PC and willing to spend thirty minutes installing mods through the official hub, you get a noticeably better game - adjusted gravity, extra tricks, community maps that range from authentic street spots to full skate parks. If you want a clean out-of-the-box experience with objectives and forward momentum, Session: Skate Sim has overtaken Skater XL in content depth. Skater XL earns its place for players who want to obsess over a single perfect manual-to-kickflip line and film it from four angles. It earns skepticism from everyone else.

Alex · Scout Team

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