Skate City [Xbox]

Originally released on Apple Arcade as a collaborative effort between Agens Games and Room 8 Studio, Skate City is a relaxing skateboarding game, where you can pull off satisfying combos and take part in tonnes of challenges. There are three cities available for you to skate in (although others are available in the iOS version), each with an Endless Skate mode available for you to just skate till your heart’s content, and a bunch of challenges (over 100 in total) for you to achieve. There’s an in-depth Tutorial available to teach you tricks, and it shows you how to pull moves off really well, making it clear and easy to understand, and there’s also a Trick Guide to view at any time to break down and get the hang of all of the tricks you can attempt. There are loads of customisation options to personalise your character, from different hats, shoes and clothing, to gorgeous new decks and a variety of different trucks and wheels.

Visually very pleasant, with skating locales in LA, Oslo, and Barcelona, you’ll be able to skate around and pull off tricks – getting better as you go. It feels very fluid, with tricks being difficult to master, and with an ever-changing day-night cycle and weather system, accompanied with some gorgeous sunlight - you’ve got the perfect backdrop. Skating around Barcelona in the pouring rain with thunderstorms overhead feels so atmospheric and enchanting. The general vibe of the game is very laidback and chilled, which is paired beautifully with an electronic, lo-fi soundtrack. Successfully pulling off tricks such as kickflips, grinds and manuals, and managing to cohesively combo them all together looks and feels very satisfying, and spending your in-game credits on Special Tricks to try out and to increase your skills in certain areas will add to this even further.

Another fun feature of Skate City is that you can record your tricks, allowing you to sell footage to Sponsors to earn Credits that can be spent on merch at the skate shop. Footage will be given a star rating out of 5, and the better you score, the more you’ll earn. Managing to pull off some sick combos is the best option here, and it’s a lot of fun to try and gain more stars. We also tried recording a massive fail, thinking maybe it would gain money in an alternate way - I mean, how many fail videos have you seen of people skateboarding!? - but sadly that didn’t work!

Priced at £12.49 on the Xbox Store, Skate City will give you a few hours of content, but with such a relaxing, enjoyable gameplay style, you’ll easily find yourself coming back time and time again. The vast number of challenges within each of the cities gives you plenty of stuff to do, ranging from racing against NPCs and skating away from cops, to working your way through trick checklists.

There’s something about skating games that are just so fun to play – maybe it’s the years upon years of watching MTV and the countless failed attempts to learn how to kickflip in real life that makes it so compelling. We hope to see the additional content come to console soon, as it’s a little disappointing for multiple new levels - as well as a Pro Skate mode - to have been implemented for iOS with no mention of a console date as of yet.

In the end, we decided to give Skate City the Collecting Asylum rating of 7.5/10.

Have you played Skate City yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Snowman for the Skate City Xbox review code!