![]() Trying to impress a fellow skater with a switch manual on a tiny, awkward plinth condemned me to 30 minutes of pavement-slamming purgatory, and trying to get it right took so long that I quickly forgot the technical details required to pull off the trick. Because Session‘s tricks require unflinching accuracy, it can take so long to get it right that you run a real risk of forgetting how the trick was explained, and there’s no way to replay the instructions you’re given. The game’s missions mostly consist of sending you away to complete a trick with a brief explanation, but there’s no help to be found if you’re left struggling. Unfortunately, Session doesn’t do a great job at explaining how to pull these tricks off. Crea-ture Studios has attacked skating with more depth than any game has attempted before, and as a result hopping on your board feels more fluid – and admittedly, more challenging – than ever. Tricks are carried out by flicking, twisting or rolling each stick – some can demand very specific timings, while others need fast reflexes or precise measures of pressure to get right. Each analogue stick ( Session doesn’t support keyboard and mouse) controls your front and back foot, while you’ve got separate buttons for pushing the board with either foot. There’s a brilliant sense of physicality that makes Session feel even more rewarding. This might entail a 5-0 grind across a handrail, a simple ollie, or perhaps a gravity-defying mix of both. Session, like most challenging games, makes up for it with an incredible sense of satisfaction when you actually manage to achieve your goal. READ MORE: Best Xbox Series X|S games: The games to play in 2022.With a high barrier to entry and controls that make you question that they are of any benefit far too often, and after a year of unimproved annoyances such as wonky animations, slow pushing, slow turning, a plethora of seemingly easily fixable bugs, and a lack of true physics for the board and grinds, without a significant overhaul of some fairly core elements of its inner workings, I just can't see Session living up to the hype.If you pause Session: Skate Sim to check the controls needed for a trick, it will remind you that it’s a “hardcore” skating sim, and you should expect it to “test your patience.” At times, that’s a laughable understatement. ![]() Rather than controlling him, it seems as though he is some sort of human puppet, that you control through fine tugs on invisible cords, that just quite doesn't do exactly what you want, just a close representation of it. It has beautiful graphics and the beginnings of an intricate over-world full of real life locations, and even and challenging and rewarding gameplay - that is, when you can muster it to do you what you want - and so the potential for a hit game is here, Muster is perhaps the perfect word to describe the gameplay, because as you can try and tell a horse to do what you want, you will never truly have control of it, just the semblance of control - as is the control of the character in Session. Session is a brave new vision for the skating genre that ultimately fails to live up to its promise. ![]() These two things are a hint that Session isn't quite the realistic skating simulator it says it is. ![]() In many areas Session actually takes a step in reverse from Skate, that is if you consider the controls an improvement, as the input for tricks are buffered (meaning they receive your input before they happen on screen, like a fighting game) and are not physics based but animation driven. They frustrate far too often and fail to add anything meaningful other than complication for complication's sake. Even after nearly 10 hours of gameplay and having come to some sort of affinity with the controls, even able to pull off some fairly complex tricks and lines it is safe to say I would have dropped them for Skate's controls in a heartbeat. Needless to say it frustrates far more often than it delights, and not only because of the steep learning curve. REVIEWED IN EARLY ACCESS With a control scheme that sounds great in theory, in practice far too often fails to prove itself as an improvement REVIEWED IN EARLY ACCESS With a control scheme that sounds great in theory, in practice far too often fails to prove itself as an improvement over the now standard control scheme such as what we saw in Skate. ![]()
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