I’ll just come out and say this: Sessions is the best skateboarding game ever. Yes, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is a classic, but it’s actually a point-scoring arcade game disguised as a skating sim. EA’s Skate is also great, and a more accurate recreation of the game, but still a video game with little concern for gravity or physics. Sessions on the other hand, Is Skateboarding. It’s a simulator in the truest sense, which not only captures the technical intricacies of skating in a way no other sport has before, but also has its more abstract qualities.
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Everything in the session is governed by a brutally realistic physics system. The best example of how important this is to the experience is how grinding works. In other skating sports your board will ‘snap’ to a rail, edge, or whatever else you are trying to grind. Its strength varies between games, but there is always an invisible guide keeping you locked in. In session, however, pulling off a successful grind is, just like in real life, a matter of speed, accuracy and angle. Either make the wrong decision and your trucks won’t lock up, you’ll lose speed, and you’ll bail.
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If you want to perform, say, a noseslide, you can’t just lean toward a rail, tap a few buttons, and watch your skater magically transition into one—the kind Se tricking usually works in skating games. You have to come in at the right angle, at the right time, bend your front leg, then position the board in such a way that the nose connects to the rail and your trucks are locked-And With such a speed that you will not slow down to a sudden stop and fall. It’s hard at first, and you’ll probably swear a lot. The easiest trick in this game is to get it too.
But when you do, Man, The sheer joy of hitting the clean grind in session—hearing the metal clink of railroad trucks hitting the rails and scraping the underside of your board—is unbeatable. If you’re feeling tempted, you can try another trick out of the grind, and if your skater’s eye has cleared up well enough, another of simple city views to include in a row. Find the piece. It might take you countless, frustrating attempts to do it without making sketchy landings or eating concrete, but that’s skateboarding, baby: joy. And pain.
The Session’s twin-stick control system is beautifully elegant and intuitive, with each analog stick representing one of your skater’s feet. To perform a kickflip, you pull a stick back – depending on whether your stance is regular or mindless – bending over and transferring your weight to your back leg. You then push the other stick diagonally into the ollie, scoop the board with your front foot, and flip it over. Advanced tricks require faster and more complex input, but everything from the 360 inward heelflip to the looser grind is based on the same basic principle.
There are three cities to skate in season—New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. But in another example of its devotion to realism, and how wonderfully it captures the spirit of street skating, these large urban sprawls are not designed specifically with skaters in mind. You’ll never turn a corner to find a perfect collection of obstacles, rails and ramps set for you. You have to think like a skater and pull them out of the landscape yourself, take the infrastructure of a modern city and do something cool with it.
You can also place your own items, leaving kickers, ramps, manual pads, rails and plywood boards to enhance the city’s architecture and create interesting opportunities for lines and moves. Meanwhile, the size of cities, and the infinite potential of physics-driven skating, the session is a sandbox of incomparable depth. I often find myself on a single rail, ledge, or set of steps—sometimes up to an hour—in my head trying to turn the line into reality. Nailing it is as rewarding as video games get.
But mastering a move and feeling amazing is a relatively small part of the session experience, especially in the early hours. You spend a lot of the game on your butt, doing too many late flips, attempting to grind at an awkward angle, or clumsily slamming into a wall. It is a sport that requires patience and perseverance to perform at its best. You Will rage quit. I have had several times, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. But you will always come back crawling—sometimes after a few minutes. Sessions is a deeply compelling game, even when it’s annoying.
You can play session freeform without any specific goal in mind. But there are optional missions if that sounds too aimless, which also drip-feed you the game’s fundamentals: grind, flip, switching, object placement, and so on. If your imagination runs out and you can’t think of anything to do then you can provide some of these welcome structures whenever you want. Some of these missions are given to you by the game’s roster of pro skaters, including Devon Song, Mark Appleyard, Annie Guglia, and Ribs Mann.
The game is also ridiculously customizable. You can tweak a huge number of variables for the feel you want, from the tightness of your truck and the grip of your wheels, to how fast you get off the board and how high you can pop. You can also enable advanced tricks like Darkslides, Caspers, and Primos if you want to go full Rodney Mullen. Default controls will suffice for most people, but if you want something more bespoke you can really delve into the weeds and create a control plan that’s completely unique to you.
As of now, there is no scoring system. When you do a trick or a line, you do it just for fun doing This. That said, did it actually happen if you didn’t have the footer to prove it? In that spirit, Sessions comes bundled with a powerful replay editor that lets you edit and share your best moments—and silently leave you to chuckle and eat dirt every now and then. There are also some neat visual options that tap into the sport’s ’90s skate video aesthetic, such as the classic fisheye lens and the ability to simulate the scratchy low-res image of an old video camera.
It’s all pretty shining so far, but there are a few things in the session that still need to be worked out. The streets are devoid of traffic and people, making them feel a bit post-apocalyptic. There’s an experimental menu where you can enable NPCs, but the implementation is rudimentary—and they get in the way most of the time. A distinct lack of voice acting in Mission or elsewhere also adds to the sense of loneliness of these vast, lifeless cities. Unfortunately, when it comes to FeelingTony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Skate have both done the session beat.
But I’ll cut the dev some slack. Sessions feels so revolutionary and genre-redefining that I often forget that this is an indie game made by a small 9-person team. Crea-Ture Studios devoted most of their time and resources to making core skating as good as possible, which is the instant you grab the controller. Pushing, flipping, grinding, spinning, manual, even bailing – everything you’re doing on the board feels sublime. As a pure skating experience it’s hard to beat, and writing it down is giving me an uncontrollable itch to play it. Not rightW
I almost took one star off the score because there is a lot of room for improvement. The aforementioned lack of atmosphere is sometimes distracting, and it’s a shame to have all these pros on board and not hear their voices. There are some UX issues, like having to click through multiple menus to bring up your move list, or some difficult missions that don’t fully explain what you need to do to complete them. In addition, there is a distinct lack of punk music on in-game radio stations. I thought it was a tribute to ’90s skateboarding?
But screw it up: I’m giving it 5 stars. Session skating is the sport I’ve always dreamed one would do, where performing even a ‘simple’ move is important and challenging. There are no mile-long grinds or 900-degree kickflips here: just actual skating in its raw form. It emulates not only the sport, but also the art of skating. You need to be creative, noticing the everyday clutter of a city and dreaming up ways to make some rad out of it. That’s what street skating is about, and why the session is the best virtual expression of the art yet.
Score 5/5. A PS5 review code was provided by the publisher.
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