When it comes to skateboarding games, developers have a few routes to take these days. While the popularized control style is the simplistic button presser, Crea-ture Studios took the more complicated yet immersive approach with their skateboarding simulator game SESSION. Recently, they had a new update to their early access on Steam that their publisher NACON helped push that added more to the game, such as a story mode. Starting the game at this point gave me the chance to experience this game as both a sandbox and a series of missions to follow.

Gameplay

As I mentioned, the developers went with the more complicated yet more immersive control style for this game. This control style lets each analog stick on your controller be the individual control for each foot. To put it simply, you have to hold down with your back foot and swipe up with your front foot to do an ollie and if you are in your fakie stance then you have to do it the other way around.

Getting used to these controls came a little natural to me after enjoying so much time on Skater XL, which uses a very similar control style. However, getting used to the physics and realism that this game provides was a whole different form of control skill. As a sandbox game with a whole city to explore and utilize, there are plenty of places to trick out on and get used to doing some awesome skills.

Lucky for me, I started with the mission lineup for a campaign that is being added to the game. This campaign felt a lot like a tutorial more than anything else. Every mission was just “prove you can do this trick, man” in different areas of the city and even had you take the bus to sections you couldn’t just skate over to. After you complete one mission, the next one is pushed on you, but you can always go into your menu and choose a different mission if you want. Completing missions will simply unlock more missions for you to do and while the main campaign is always pushed one-after-another, completing the side missions will simply put you back out into the city to enjoy some freestyle skateboarding.

All of the missions are definitely helpful to complete though because they force you to complete a trick or series of tricks that you likely haven’t done yet. Some tricks I didn’t even know where different from others, such as the pressure flip. I’ve been playing skateboarding games since I was young, but never actually learned the skill myself in real life, so I had no idea that there were such specifics as that. Because doing a pressure flip is a different set of footwork than a kickflip, despite them looking very similar, you have to actually pull it off with these controls.

Of course, there is some customization aspects to the game and you can set up your character how you like as well. You can unlock more options as you complete missions and earn money along the way.

Expectations

While the flips, manuals, and general movement all felt really smooth in the game, I can’t help but feel that the grinding mechanic simply needs work. Pulling off grinds has been the most challenging thing in my gameplay experience so far and the majority of the time I know I am doing it right, but it just doesn’t register properly. I have resorted to simply doing a boardslide almost every time I need to do a grind because of this registry issue.

The campaign missions feeling like a tutorial but the explanations for the tricks being vague is quite infuriating. Whenever I would feel stuck or confused about what they wanted from me, I would get agitated at the fact that there weren’t quick clips to watch the trick being performed and many of the missions didn’t let you talk to the person again after you were given instructions the first time. On top of that, when you check the logs to read up on your mission, it basically just says “do the trick to continue” which is incredibly unhelpful. They need to include more instructions and make it easier to understand what it is they want the player to do in order to move on with the campaign.

Verdict

SESSION. as a skateboarding simulator sandbox is a pretty fun game and there is a lot of room in the environment to pull off a variety of stunts. However, when it comes to this new campaign they are implementing, it is lacking in ways that are just annoying. Getting stuck on a mission because you are unsure what they are asking you to do and then having no way to get the details clarified turns it into a trick guessing game of just doing different things close to what they are asking for in order to just move on. I understand making it mandatory to complete the tricks before moving on to the next mission, but please add some clarity to these missions. I often found myself just ignoring the missions and enjoying the sandbox part of the skating simulator so that I could just enjoy the game itself without getting agitated with it at the same time.