When Jackass characters started appearing in my skating games, a little part of me died. The appeal of the Tony Hawks franchise took an epic swan dive in one fell swoop of mainstream tomfoolery. Project 8 had a few redeeming factors but fell short of bringing back the feeling of perfection that THPS 2 forced down our necks with the power of a top speed face plant.

Fast forward to 2010 a year where messrs Hawk & Kotick are languishing under the idea that what the skateboard genre really needs is more titles incorporating gimmicky peripherals (cost of lounge room humiliator - TH:Ride = £110, cost of an actual skateboard = £60-£90. Is it just me who thinks that if you're proactive enough to be throwing yourself around your living room on a plastic piece of 2x4 you might as well be doing it outside and getting some air and sunshine while you’re at it?!) and where Skate 3 is released, EAs surprise hit series and successor to the Tony Hawks throne.

Skate takes pride in its unmatched level of realism. Not only is doing tricks a challenge with the 'Flickit' control scheme but chaining up billion point combos is a thing of the past. Skate 3 is no different than its predecessors in that it most certainly likes to keep things 'real'. You start by completing a simple tutorial (given by My Name Is Earl star Jason Lee aka Coach Frank) which covers the basics of navigating the game world using the Flickit system. The Flickit system is essentially the method of flicking your right thumb stick down & up to initiate an ollie/nollie and then using either the left or right stick to 'tweak' the jump into a grab or flip trick. This takes a fair bit of getting used to, especially if you’re a Hawk veteran where the A/X button is the lord of the ollie, but when mastered becomes so enjoyable that just skating around tricking off simple stair sets and curbs is somehow a worthwhile use of your time.

Manuals and grinds are also worked into the flickit system. Manuals are accomplished by pulling back ever-so-slightly on the right stick and grinds are just a case of lining up an ollie correctly and tweaking in any given direction to specify the grind type. All the available set of core moves can be modified further with the triggers, shoulder and face buttons but in a lot of cases this isn’t even required to fully enjoy the skating on offer here – it’s simply a bonus for those looking for a deeper, more thorough experience.

The primary goal of skate is to generate board sales for a fictional company which you found at the start of the game. You earn board sales by completing challenges, and most challenges have three ways to complete them: Owned, Killed, Online. Owning a challenge is merely completing its basic requirements, Killing a challenge is performing the task but with extra goals/caveats and Online is where you complete the challenge with a buddy. There are roughly 6 milestones of board sales to work towards with the final one being 1,000,000. Challenges can be acquired from NPCs scattered around the game world, or via the challenge menu when paused.

Challenges which are organised into a number of categories such as Film and Photo shoot are self explanatory but some more obscure ones might only be obvious to fans of the previous Skate games. Hall of Meat is the sickening practise of throwing yourself off of a variety of environment landmarks and purposefully initiating a bail in order to break the most amount of bones (represented in real time by a skeleton within your transparent player model), while Deathrace involves starting at the top of a big hill with 3 other skaters and racing down to the bottom with no preservation for your own life (or ability to walk afterwards!)

A problem I encountered early on was that due to the nonlinear, free roaming nature of the large game world I used the teleport functionality in the menu to travel straight to challenge locations (something i felt rather dirty for). The issue here is that i was often teleported to an entirely new locale which i'd not even seen before let alone found how to get there through the standard method of skating. This resulted in an odd feeling that i was somehow cheating myself out of sections of the game, like i was losing out on the experience somehow. I was never instructed to go to any of the 3 districts by an NPC nor did Coach F-F-Frank tell me to go there (play the game, you'll get it) Simply not using the teleport command didnt seem like a sensible option as that would entail a good 10-15mins skating to the challenge location. With 60+ challenges to complete, this would be a horrendous task to uptake.

New with this iteration is a kind of networking framework where you can create a skate team and recruit other players to your team, this functions in much the same way as you’d expect clan support to operate in an FPS. You can assign specific roles to your team with individual efforts in game contributing to the team rating and board sales targets. If you belong to a team any videos or photos you create get automatically posted onto your team homepage for members and visitors to see (complete with ratings and top featured functionality), a very nice community feature. One massive problem with this is that it is all hosted on EAs dedicated servers and on the weekend of release these seem to have died a slow and painful death leaving most players unable to access this functionality and when they finally do are privy to horrific load times and endless menu loops complete with repetitive error messages.

When you finally do manage to create or join a team you are able to jump into the game world with them in order to complete challenges together. This poses a similar menu gripe in that you have to enter the online challenge menu and teleport to the location each time you want to work on one. This comes hand in hand with annoying load times every time you finish a challenge, select a challenge and teleport to location. The load times make multiplayer quite a slow experience as often you will wait through 3 loading screens just for you and your buddy to flip trick down one set of stairs, challenge complete 3 yawns later and you’re picking a new challenge and looking forward to 3 more loads. It’s frustrating to say the least.

The skate.create facilities operate as you would expect, several tutorials guide you through creating a skatepark which is a new feature for Skate 3. After finishing the tutorials you are given free rein over a warehouse in which you can plonk any assortment of rails, pipes, verts and boxes as you please. You can then upload your skatepark to the online catalogue where it is available for everyone to download (and rate). Ratings mean extra board sales so there’s en element of value to this exercise other than boasting rights.

The photo and video editing functionality makes a welcome return, relatively unchanged, and can also be submitted in the same way as skateparks. All these creative tools are pooled together and accessed from the pause menu. You have the option at any point to upload your creations to the online catalogue and from there you can download and play everyone elses content. This allows for limitless possibilities and plenty of new content on hand if ever you get bored of skating around Skate 3’s world of Carverton. One glance at the catalogue of uploaded content is enough to suggest that there are plenty of you out there having fun with these tools already.

If you put aside the gripes you have some very fun gameplay. The actual skating in Skate 3 is thoroughly enjoyable and in my opinion trumps the arcade combofest of Tony Hawks. Essentially you have some of the best skating gameplay of this generation wrapped in an awful menu flow mired by frequently (albeit small) load times. If you can turn a blind eye to these and if you enjoyed either of the previous Skate games I strongly suggest you pick this one up – you’ll be getting an upgraded experience with enough extra bells and whistles to keep you going for a while. Alternatively if you live on the other side of the proverbial vert and subscribe to Mr Hawks tired and tested (see what I did there?!) method of skateboard based trickery then I urge you to leave the birdman in his 90’s heyday and join the rest of us on Skate 3. Leave your plastic skateboard at the door though, please.