Those still holding out hope for the return of EA’s Skate franchise shouldn’t expect the announcement of a sequel any time soon. Thankfully, a potential spiritual successor to the popular series is little more than a month away.
Session is an upcoming skateboarding game from the Canadian development team at crea-ture Studios and will be available to play as of September 17th. It will be launching on PC first via Steam Early Access before arriving on the Xbox Game Preview program in October.
Running on Unreal Engine 4, Session promises to be a proper skateboarding sim with no arcade style point systems, power ups, or wacky game modes. crea-ture Studios is focused purely on the what it calls the golden era of skateboarding and the unique culture that built up around it.
With this being an early access version of the game, there are plenty of features still in the pipeline along with additional gameplay content. This preview of Session will let skaters roam a 1:1 slice of Lower Manhattan, an area that includes the Brooklyn Banks hotspot shown in the early access announcement trailer above.
Session won’t just fill the void left by Skate, Tony Hawk’s, and the current lack of skateboarding games, it looks to steer the genre in a completely new, more experimental direction.
As touched on before, point scoring and ticking off a list of objectives isn’t the focus here, it’s a combination of style and expression, Session’s video editor allowing skaters to cut their own trick montages bearing that same grungy camcorder look.
Like most games in early access, Session will continue to grow periodically, fuelled by community feedback.
Announced back in 2017, Session quickly caught the attention of skateboarding fans and later made an appearance at Microsoft’s E3 press conference in 2018. There’s been no word on a PlayStation 4 release as of yet.
Source: Game Informer
ico
That looks lovely! Can’t believe it’s been over 10 years since Skate 3! I’m happy with boarding games just being about the lines and tricks and general mooching around though hopefully this will also have some degree of progression. Multiplayer (local especially) would be greatly appreciated (in the way Skate did it) though I suspect we won’t see this (I’d take a pass the pad option). Looking forward to seeing how this reviews and the price point. I also see it was started on Kickstarter.
ico
PS the fact that the related stories under the main story nearly all hark back over 10 years again shows how sorely lacking a decent skateboarding sim has been. I got Steep on the xbox one but haven’t really had chance to put any time into it.
tactical20
Hopefully this sells really well and stays in the charts for a long time, purely to spite EA.