Session: Skate Sim

An unapologetically tricky ode to street skating, Session is packed with a palpable love for the sport, but bugs and unsympathetic tutorial and mission design decisions undermine its approachability.

Imperfect, unkind, and rough round the edges, Session captures more of real skateboarding than almost any game that has come before.

In contrast, Session feels back-to-front: so unblinkingly focused on the technical side of riding a skateboard that it's overlooked everything that makes rolling around on a board actually fun. There’s plenty of room for skateboarding games less arcadey than anything with a Tony Hawk face on it, but this early version of Session is a bleak, sterile thing, and one that only serves as a painful reminder of my own lack of talent in most physical activities.

The mission structure of the game devolves into going to a place, doing a trick or route, strung along by forgettable story dialogue. The missions have a habit of being poorly explained, furthered by being unable to re-read text boxes explaining what you need to do. And rarely do the inputs needed for specific moves get shown during these prompts. For better or worse, Session is a game for the hardcore skater. While its dedication to realism is impressive, the frustration in the early hours is likely to turn most off.

Session: Skate Sim is a valiant attempt to recreate the trials and tribulations of actual, real-life skateboarding that eschews the arcade flashiness of other skating games in favour of slow and methodical repetition and mastery of both your board and your environment. There's a deep and involving game here for skate fans who want something to really sink their teeth into, or at least there would be if it wasn't for blurry visuals, control issues, poor mission design, and frame rate issues that make for an uphill struggle that just doesn't feel worth the pain in the end. If you've got a ton of patience there's still some joy to be found here, but it's gonna take some patches and updates to get this particular port to the place it needs to be in order to earn a full recommendation.

In particular, it’d be nice if the game did more in the way of teaching you the ropes, offered different control schemes, and provided a wider array of accessibility options. In general as well, it’d be nice if the game offered more in the way of incentives, excitement, and action to keep you coming back for more, regardless of its punishing difficulty.

Session: Skate Sim is a skate simulation that forgets to be a skate game.

Session: Skate Sim on Switch feels better when controlling the board, but the visuals certainly suffer in both handheld and docked.

Physics adjustments on the fly, animation adjustments, and massive maps. In an attempt to include this fully featured PC game on the Switch there had to be concessions and we see that in both visuals and how it plays. It's a miracle that the game runs at all, but just because you can port it, doesn't mean you should.

Definitely living up to the “sim” aspect of its title, the controls are a formidable obstacle, but possibly not for the reason you’d think