Remember Session? When it was first revealed it was lauded to be the Skate game fans have been clamouring for. But a lot has happened since its first reveal in 2017 to today. The game now has a publisher in the form of Nacon. Skate 4 (or at least a new Skate game) is officially in development. And there are a few good skateboarding games that are out there in the market, including one that has a similar sim-like approach to skateboarding: Skater XL.
So is there a space for Session right now? I hope so.
The game has been in Early Access for a while and is getting a big update that’s going live today which adds the Jerome Avenue Banks location, a new career mode and 5 new pro skaters. I’ve got to play this build ahead of its release, and this is my first time getting my hands on Session since its initial Kickstarter demo.
As it is right now, Session is sick and has potential. But is it ready for a full release?
Flick Sticks For Sick Tricks
Session describes itself to be a hard game, and is inspired by the “golden age of skateboarding”. Aesthetic-wise, it feels like you never left the late ’90s-early ’00s with its soundtrack featuring hip-hop beats and thrashy metal music. It’s great if you love the era.
But what will make Session stands apart from other skateboarding games is its intricate tricking system, dubbed the “True Stance Stick”. The left analog stick controls the left foot, the right analog stick controls the right foot. Just like how you pull a flip trick while skateboarding in real life, you do a combination of left and right foot movement to flip the board around. To do a kickflip, it involves pulling the left analog stick down, then front (for the jump) and then the right analog stick to the left (to “kick” the board into the flip) when it’s airborne.
Or was it the right analog stick down, then front and then right analog stick to the right?
You see, since the default controls assign the stick to each foot, when you are in a switch stance, the controls are mirrored. So you always need to be on your feet on which feet orientation you are in now. Not as easy considering the camera viewpoint is centred on the skateboard at a low angle. Your skater having a regular stance (left side of the body is facing the front) or a goofy stance has a gameplay implication.
It’s a big jump of difficulty thanks to this (the tutorials feel cumbersome as a result), and much more complicated than what Skate offered. But developers Creā-Ture Studios do let you customise how hard you want it to be. You can have the sticks to be assigned as “back foot” and “front foot” so you don’t have to mirror the controls each time you switch sides. Or, you can pick “Legacy” controls to play Session like how you play Skate.
On the default difficulty, flip tricks are a blast to pull off. Like real life, skaters don’t really do 100,000 point combos with a 50-chain trick. So pulling off a sick flip across a flight of stairs into a manual (requiring you to pull the back foot stick halfway down or the front foot stick halfway up) is already a big achievement. More advance tricks require half-circle motions on one stick with a direction on the other.
Flatland skating is super fun as it is right now. Turning the skateboard left and right with the triggers (which can also be used to add spins) is actually intuitive once you get the hang of it. Though having stance-switching/reverts tied to double-tapping either trigger means doing minor turning corrections by tapping the triggers leads to unintentional stance switching.
Grinding, however, is a bit of a hit-or-miss. The default settings require you to have the intent to grind, so you must have input when approaching a grind spot for it to be registered as a grind and not a bail. And yes, there are options to customise this to make grinds easier at the cost of realism.
The game is hard, but I appreciate that the devs are not hard committing to a specific difficulty, letting players tailor what part of the sim works for them and what needs to be simplified.
There are more tricks that are currently in development. That includes grab tricks, caspers (tricks where the skateboard lands upside down), and primos (tricks where the skateboard lands on its side). More cool tricks are in the works.
As it stands right now, Session offers a decent variety of parks and locales to shred around and do tricks spread around two US cities: New York and Philidelphia. Some of these are actual skate locales. For instance, the newly added Jerome Avenue Banks is just a set of stairs in some alleyway, but it has been the spot of many sick tricks being pulled by the brave and bold. That’s cool to see.
Still Too Rough In The Edges?
Now the big problem I have with Session right now is how janky it is in many other aspects surrounding the package. Skating on flatland works, but when you go into quarterpipes and pools it feels awfully undercooked. Am I doing a lip trick or does the skateboard happen to be stuck in the geometry? And what the heck is happening to the skater’s body? It doesn’t know how to react to the acute change in angle, so there are a lot of times where the skateboard ends up upright after climbing over a quarterpipe lip, but the skater’s body couldn’t follow along.
Is it funny? Heck yeah. But if Session is aiming for realism, then there’s still more work to be done.
The other part I don’t find appealing is the user interface. It feels too barebones and slap-dashed as it is right now. I love the digital LED subway font where the lower-case “g” has to look like a “9” but when used as the main font, reading tons and tons of text is tiring. There’s now a career mode of sorts with missions and objectives you need to complete missions and its objectives are not stickied onto the HUD (the game barely has any HUD as a matter of fact), and hidden under too many layers in the pause menu. You can bring it up by clicking the thumbstick, apparently, and I figured that out by accident rather than a prompt letting me know of it.
The customisation menu could use some love as well. You can filter the items by brands, including brands that have zero items for that customisation category, which means there’s still clutter in the UI that needed cleaning up.
These are probably known issues, and something that may be addressed by the time Session leaves Early Access. But at the state of the game right now, I feel the game’s not ready for prime time yet. It needs to be further polished.
Closing Thoughts
That being said, Session is fun if you’re already sold on its gameplay mechanics as it is right now. The foundation is solid. Content-wise it’s getting there.
Now it’s a matter of making it appealing enough to onlookers and fans of skateboarding games that are not Skate-adjacent that this game is worth playing. Fingers crossed the devs get the time and resources to polish off the game so it can reach its full potential: a fantastic skateboarding sim.
Session is set for release sometime in September for PS4, PS5, PC (Steam), Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
Played On PC. Preview key provided by the publisher