As someone who has spent over ⅔ of his life riding a skateboard, I’ll be the first to say that skating is not an easy skill. Between falling, destroying your shoes on grip tape, and spending weeks trying to land that first kickflip, it’s as grueling and time-consuming as it is rewarding and fun. VR Skater is no different in that regard. While it’s obvious that a VR skateboard will never replace the real thing, I was still skeptical about how “real” it would feel coasting over digital concrete while having a bulky PSVR2 headset strapped to my face. But after landing that first kickflip over a set of tires, all my doubts were gone, and I found myself looking forward to mastering my next trick.
If I had to sum up VR Skater in one word, it would be “challenging.” While its intuitive controls and bite-sized tutorials are helpful in making the experience of skateboarding in VR as comfortable as possible, it still takes a bit more skill and practice than any other skateboarding games before it. While the presentation is definitely inspired by the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, don’t expect to fly around its courses while achieving gravity-defying tricks just yet.
VR Skater starts with a simple tutorial on movement, basic tricks, and then a few small challenges, such as riding between sets of tires and ollieing down a set of stairs. Outside of pressing X to ollie to stick a landing, you’ll need to control the movement of the board with your hands in a similar fashion you would with your feet in real life. This is where the challenge really sets in. If you’re familiar with how to ride a skateboard, then the act of sliding your left foot forward on the edge of the board to make it flip would come naturally. If you aren’t, then the controls may take a little while to get used to, since not only will you need to properly push and kick your board after ollieing, but you’ll need to stick the landing like you would in real life. A little bit of patience and time is needed to figure out how the game wants you to skateboard, but once you do, it becomes a rewarding experience and I found myself having a blast trying out new tricks and skating around the few locations I had access to in the preview build.
Outside of pressing X to ollie to stick a landing, you’ll need to control the movement of the board with your hands in a similar fashion you would with your feet in real life. This is where the challenge really sets in.
That’s not to say everything about this game is smooth skating. Some tricks, such as a board slide, were a huge pain to learn. The tutorials were intuitive, though, and explained how the game wanted you to play it in a way that made every trick easy to figure out over time. Board slides, which are in essence, one of the simpler grinds you can do in real life, just never seemed to land with me. VR Skater could also use some accessibility options, such as the ability to snap to an object to help make grinds a little bit easier. There were a few times I simply could not do a trick because I wasn’t able to turn the board quick enough or I was just too far away from some stairs or a bench I was looking to grind on. While it’s not the end of the world and this is definitely something that is resolved with a bit of patience and practice, having the option to make skate sessions a little more snappy would go a long way.
The overall presentation of VR Skater very much mimics the best parts of the Tony Hawk and the Skate games. The soundtrack is an excellent mix of pop punk and hip hop, and its courses range from a developing suburbian neighborhood, a port complete with shipping containers and conveniently placed steel beams, and a comically large set of vert ramps in the middle of the desert.
When you inevit ably fall in VR Skater, you instantly respawn somewhere nearby. While this was a great way to stay immersed and not get frustrated whenever I crashed into a wall or missed a rail,t was frustrating not being able to restart in the exact location I had started unless I opened a menu and manually set a respawn point. Other than this, the ability to restart any run immediately after crashing helped motivate me to try, try, and try again to land something worthy of a classic 411 skate tape highlight.
Like skateboarding in real life, VR Skater may not be for everybody. But after a little bit of trial and error and patience, it quickly became one of those rare video games where every piece of the puzzle just seemed to fit for me. Its presentation is worthy of the legacy pioneered by the Tony Hawk and Skate games, and its intuitively challenging but rewarding gameplay loop makes this a fun VR experience. The option to have a bit more accessibility and hand-holding from the game would have been a welcome feature and its respawning system could use a bit more time to cook, but nevertheless, VR Skater is shaping up to be not only an excellent addition to anyone’s PSVR game library but also a great way to experience the most rewarding aspect of skateboarding without needing to worry about hurting yourself.
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