It is quite a special day when a new competitor challenges a long-established series. You would be hard-pressed to name a series with less than Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but Skate provides a viable alternative for the first time in, well... I suppose ever. When you stop to think about it, the most surprising thing is how long it took Electronic Arts to get in on the action.

Skate is an Sports game, and you can tell it from the start. The menu system that greets you has all the polish of any of their other games, from the licensed soundtrack down to the trendy visuals. Diving straight into the Create-a-Skater mode, there are plenty of face-editing options, obviously taking their cue from The 2, so you should be able to get a fairly good approximation of yourself on the screen. You also have a few clothing options, although at the start of the game most of these are locked.

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The locked clothing brings me to the main point of the game. The aim is to get sponsors and maximum exposure in the game's two magazines: Skateboard Magazine and Trasher. As you obtain more exposure in each magazine, you will get the option to have a top company sponsor your deck, your trainers, your trucks, and your wheels. As you collect sponsors, you unlock more gear. This is basically the aim of the game, and is a refreshing change to the standard "win the competition" objectives.

Once the game has started, you have a few tutorials to get through. This game runs on a completely different system to what we have all been used to for the last 10 years. It has been billed as a more realistic system, and it certainly feels so. You effectively use the right thumbstick in a rough approximation of how you want the board to move - flick it backwards and forwards quickly to ollie, for example. Flick it backwards and then around and up to perform a pop shuv it. Hold it in the "sweet spot", balanced between the extremes, in order to perform a manual. Press A or X to push off with your right or left foot and get up some speed. The left thumbstick controls the steering, and you can also press down to crouch down for a minor boost in speed.

I was playing the version of the game, and I would say that the graphics aren't quite as good as last year's Tony Hawk's Project 8. The models do seem slightly more artificial with less detail or shading, and the frame-rate is not quite as good. The surrounding city does look quite pretty, and there are a lot of pedestrians and even other skaters making their way around. Also, when your skater takes a fall, he will bounce along very convincingly.

Now, the first few times you see your skater falling over, you will appreciate that it looks rather good. And the next few times as well. And I thank for making falling over look pretty, because you will be falling over an awful lot in this game. Okay, EA Sports have made a more realistic game. But let's face it; skateboarding is difficult. Just try stringing together some of those million-point combos we are all used to; this game will spit you out and laugh in your face. There is also no "magnetic" locking on to a grind rail with a single button - you need to jump at the right angle and land the skateboard correctly onto the rail to get going.

It does take a while to get into this different mindset, but I just needed some time to re-align myself and start with a clean slate. Even a number of hours in, I was still attempting to ollie with the A button every now and then after 10 years of conditioning. I'm sure someone who has never owned a title will not have a problem with this, but I suspect that, of the people who will buy this game, they will be in a tiny minority.

Anyway, the true skateboarding mindset is that heelflips are cool and slightly tricky rather than a single button press, and a flip-trick into a manual and out into another flip-trick is worthy of your photograph in a magazine. After a frustrating couple of hours, you will really start to appreciate small victories and before long you will be putting together some lines which feel so much better because they could actually be feasible in real life.

The objectives for each magazine are generally photography or video related - perform x trick at y location while your friend takes your photo, or score x points while doing y number of grinds in a certain area while your friend films it. There is also the odd "best trick" competition, and standard rack-up-the-points competitions scattered around the city. In general, objectives for The Skateboard Mag are more traditional, such as competitions or simple photographs. Objectives for Trasher are more reminiscent of Bam Margera and Jackass - take part in a high-speed downhill race, or perform a number of tricks in a prohibited area while dodging security.

The city is absolutely huge, and every area is unlocked from the start. This is a nice touch, but you can get completely lost at first. Skating around the city for each objective is time-consuming, and the feature is included to warp straight to each objective via the map. This is lucky, as it is quite hazardous to get from one end of the city to the other - there are a lot of cars which have no qualms about flattening you, and a lot of pedestrians to smash into and send you both flying. It does get old very quickly, and the warping function truly is a game-saver.

Whether you like this game will probably depend on what you want out of sports games. Certain people will still prefer the Tony Hawk's series, and those people are the ones who want to do the incredibly cool tricks immediately and build up to quite frankly impossible but amazingly stylish stuff. Other people will want something close to a true skateboarding simulation, and those people will prefer Skate. If you want another comparison, I believe it is similar to the difference between the Burnout series and the series. Both games, certainly, but very different and appealing to different people.

On balance, I personally will probably stick with the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. But there is definitely an audience out there for Skate. It is a very well made game and will be appreciated more by those who would prefer a bit more realism. That leaves the game with a very respectable score in my book.

85%

By Richard Bright