Session: Skate Sim Review (skachacha)
This game is not finished.
Now it's important to establish that I do not—and by extension, nobody but the team behind this game really do—know why they decided it was a good idea to sell this game as a finished product. My guess is to make the game available on more platforms, for more people, and being able to play this game on PlayStation is undoubtedly awesome; it's great that more players get to have their hands on the single most definitive skateboarding simulator out there right now, but this game did not deserve to leave Early Access.
It's buggy, and it's broken. It's lacking features and optimisations critical to the full skateboarding experience. The game feels completely empty. Character customisation is laughably underdeveloped. You can't even skate goofy-footed without noticeably janky animations; sucks to be that other half of the skateboarding population, I guess. Features touted as part of the game are still listed under experimental menus, a signal that these things are subject to change, or subject to be abandoned completely.
This was never a problem, of course, and anybody else whom sunk the hundreds of hours that I did into this game, across both Steam and Xbox no less, understands that the pleasure you get out of playing Session is the same joy you get out of real-life skateboarding: being part of a culture, expressing yourself, bettering yourself. I want to make it clear that this core aspect of the game hasn't changed whatsoever, in fact it has only improved, and undoubtedly will continue to improve...
But now that the game has released, the bar is raised. Early Access was a completely acceptable excuse for buggy, broken experimental features, outdated animations, a soulless city and a glitchy story mode that feels more like a proof of concept than a campaign, among a longer list of bugs and issues that the game has always suffered from. There is no longer any acceptable reason for the game to be in this state.
The players expect more, and they are right to expect more. Veteran players like myself may continue to enjoy the game for the little skateboarding sandbox that it offers—I know that I definitely am never going to stop playing this game and following its development—but there is nothing in this game that was worth a 1.0 build number. Nothing in this game that is worth £34.99, that's for sure.