I’ve been playing Skate 3 for a couple of weeks and it’s one of those games that when you play it you want to skate, just like Assassins Creed it makes me want to climb buildings and poison people. Ok, maybe not the last, but you get the idea.

Skate 3 has improved from the last two skates, and since there was only one year between Skate 2 and Skate 3, I didn’t expect such a big change in gameplay.

The graphics are similar to Skate 2, which is not a bad thing, since the graphics were already impressive. The developers at BlackBox have added a difficulty option so that if you’re bad like me, you don’t have to be perfect in the timing of your tricks and flips. Skate 3 also allows you to play the campaign with your friends. I usually think that games that let you play the story with friends are more fun because when you play alone it can get boring too quickly.

The way to do tricks in Skate 3 is by moving the analog stick, I prefer this to the Tony Hawks method of spamming the buttons and hopefully pulling off some sweet tricks. I think when you do the tricks and flips with the analog stick, the connection between what you’re doing and the actions of your skaters is realistic and gives the game a better feel. I do like the analog approach though. Sometimes it can be quite tricky to remember which direction to do what, I found myself spending most of my time getting close to things like the floor and walls, as the video below shows…

One thing that has impressed me is the video editing capability, if you like to capture funny moments, fails or have a knack for tricks, you will enjoy this a lot. It is very easy to capture the video and edit the camera angles, effects and size of the skating clips. Once you’ve edited the clips, they’ll be uploaded directly to the Skate website, where you can view/rate other people’s videos.

The only other things I feel I need to mention is that Skate 3 has almost 50 artists registered on the soundtrack, here you will see artists like The Misfits, Steel Panther and Neil Diamond. As you can clearly see from those three artists, the soundtracks had a pretty wide variety of artists.

My opinion of this game is quite high compared to what it was before I played it. Before playing the game I expected it to be like Tony Hawks, I’m glad I was wrong because I really enjoyed this game, it brings a nice fresh feel to skating games. I would recommend this game to skaters, people who would like to skate and even people who don’t care about skating as it is a really fun game.