Skate Story

A deal with the Devil, on four wheels

Skate Story's premise commits fully to its own strangeness: you're a demon made of glass, offered freedom by the Devil in exchange for skating all the way to the Moon and swallowing it whole. That journey takes you through nine surreal layers of a low-poly, PS2-inspired Underworld, ollying and kickflipping past tortured souls and demonic obstacles while a soundtrack built largely around the band Blood Cultures plays underneath. The presentation is where the game earns its reputation most decisively — reviewers reach for unusually personal, reflective language to describe it, with one comparing the experience to "a snippet out of one of William Burroughs' books" and another describing an early hub area that "never asks you to think... it asks you to feel." That's a higher bar of praise than typical genre enthusiasm, and it recurs across enough of the corpus to trust as a real, widely-shared reaction rather than a few unusually effusive outliers.

A real disagreement about the skating itself

Set against that presentation is a genuine, detailed split over the mechanics the whole game is ostensibly built around. A substantial minority of reviewers argue the trick system doesn't hold up: one describes it as repeatedly cycling through a small set of trigger-and-button combinations to "stomp the board and cash in," with no pipes or grabs to add depth, calling the underlying game "thoroughly mediocre" beneath its graphics and music. More than one reviewer makes the comparison explicit and pointed, arguing that Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games from more than two decades ago achieve a level of mechanical sophistication Skate Story doesn't reach — a specific, checkable claim about genre history rather than vague dissatisfaction. A related complaint concerns pacing between skating and story: several reviewers describe spending more time skipping cutscenes than actually skating, and one bluntly suggests "this game should have just been a music video."

That's not the majority view, though, and it's worth stating the opposing case with equal weight. Plenty of reviewers describe the controls as tight and responsive, with more than one directly invoking Tony Hawk's control scheme as a positive comparison rather than a negative one — the same franchise the critics cite is, for these players, the compliment rather than the standard the game fails to meet. The truth the corpus suggests is that Skate Story's mechanics reward a specific kind of patient, rhythm-focused play, and reviewers who approached it that way report genuine satisfaction where others, expecting more conventional trick-chaining depth, came away disappointed.

What's missing for now

Beyond the core disagreement, one specific, repeated request unites reviewers on both sides: a free-skate mode outside the structured campaign. Several reviewers who otherwise loved the game specifically wish for a sandbox space to practice tricks and explore the game's striking environments without the pressure of story progression, arguing it would meaningfully extend a short experience's replay value. Camera behaviour draws separate, more critical attention — multiple reviewers describe losing speed quickly enough during tricks that chaining together anything resembling a flowing run becomes a fight against the game's own systems rather than a skill worth mastering.

Progression through 70-plus tricks

Beneath the narrative, Skate Story layers a genre-appropriate progression system: souls sold for decks, wheels and trucks keep your equipment fresh, and skate trials scattered through the Underworld let you level up, learn new tricks from a roster the store page counts at more than 70, and earn new gear. Reviewers engaging with this system describe it as a reasonable, if not especially deep, structure for pacing out the campaign's roughly nine chapters — few single it out for praise the way they do the music or visuals, but few call it actively broken either, positioning it as competent scaffolding for the experience built around it rather than a highlight in its own right.

A largely solo vision

Skate Story is credited to Sam Eng working essentially alone, and that solo authorship is a relevant frame for weighing both the praise and the criticism above. Reviewers who describe the game in personal, almost reverent terms are often responding to exactly that — a single, clear creative vision expressed with unusual confidence across art, music curation and tone, rather than a committee-designed product. That same solo scope plausibly explains why the mechanical depth some reviewers wanted is thinner than a larger studio's dedicated skateboarding game might achieve: Skate Story reads less like a skateboarding game with a story bolted on, and more like a narrative art project that happens to use skateboarding as its verb, which is precisely the framing that satisfies one half of its audience and disappoints the other.

The verdict

Skate Story is, by a wide consensus, a genuinely exceptional audiovisual experience — the soundtrack and art direction earn some of the most personally invested praise this review has encountered, and that alone justifies its reputation for many players. Whether the skateboarding underneath that presentation satisfies depends heavily on what you're bringing to it: reviewers who wanted Tony Hawk-level trick depth report real disappointment, while those who approached it as a rhythm-driven, atmosphere-first experience describe something close to a small masterpiece. Both reactions are well represented and well argued in the game's own review corpus, and this review's honest advice is to watch footage of the actual skating before buying, since your reaction to that footage will likely predict which side of this genuine split you land on.