Game Review: Skate 2

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

Skate 2

For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360

From: EA

ESRB Rating: Teen (alcohol reference, language, mild violence, suggestive themes)

Given its contributions to classing up the skateboarding genre and returning it to its fundamentals, "Skate" often is misremembered as something of a humorless game despite being nothing of the sort.

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Though it refines all that serious stuff that made the first game so good, "Skate 2" likely won't have the same problem. And you can thank the Hall of Meat - a series of controls and challenges devoted to wiping out and causing as much creative, self-inflicted bodily harm as inhumanely possible - for that. When flying off your board is not only as fun as staying on it, but entirely rewarding in its own right, it's that much harder to resist the game's charms.

"S2's" other big addition - the ability to get off your board, walk freely and move loose objects around to create your own makeshift stunt sequence - is equally welcome, albeit in spite of itself. It works as one would hope it would, and the degree to which it's implemented - both in the career mode and through a mode that lets you design and share stunt challenges with other players online - is inspired.

Too bad your custom-designed skater walks around like there's a Festivus pole stuck up his or her shirt. The off-board controls are unreasonably stiff, and that's a most unpleasant surprise considering how polished "S2's" on-board controls are.

Fortunately, the extreme majority of "S2" takes place on a board, and the game only improves on its predecessor in that regard. The action on the whole is smoother and snappier, your bag of tricks considerably fattened up, and the ability to string them together made easier and more fun thanks to a little tightening on the accessibility and rough edges front.

Like the original game, "S2" also gives you plenty to do on both the single- and multiplayer sides. The occasional obnoxious objective awaits in the career mode - the antagonizing security guards return, and they're more annoying than ever - but for the most part, the challenges are accessible, open to creativity and just brief enough to keep you constantly in motion. Beating one challenge often opens open two or three more, and between the varying locations and objectives, the game isn't hurting for diversity.

That's markedly more true online. Once again, you can set up trick competitions and share and rate highlight reels (which, thank you Hall of Meat, is more fun than ever). But "S2" also takes some of "Burnout Paradise's" medicine, allowing you to instantly jump into an online free skate session, which features its own set of challenges and a leveling system that will have completionists drooling.

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