At first glance, Skate is very understated. The boxart is a beautifully simple close-up of a wheel, whilst the name itself, “Skate”, is entirely free of the extreme. Rather than any in-your-face style marketing, EA are letting the excellent demo speak for itself. It certainly ensured we put in an order. Thankfully, the full game lives up to and exceeds the expectations set by the demo. Skate is a complete package and constantly amazes in what it has achieved - a down-to-earth skating session on your console, in a natural, realistic game-world. Often realism is something to be avoided in videogames, but what EA have seized upon here is that skateboarding is all about the joy of pulling off simple tricks on simple obstacles. This baseline mantra runs throughout Skate and for this, they should be applauded.

Have you ever watched someone skateboarding or seen a video and been impressed with the way something that unstable and not even attached to the rider can be manipulated so deftly? Or wished you could do the same? If so you’ll love Skate. Even the simple action of jumping up a kerb and landing properly will leave you grinning early on. The first-time thrill of seeing your customised skater land into a grind and hopping back to the ground again is very special.

Skate takes the established ideas of what a board riding game should be and chucks much of it away. Instead of big-air, crazy tricks and collectathons, what’s important is that you get the same thrill from a quick grind along the edge of a picnic table as you do from firing out the top of a half-pipe and whipping the board away briefly before landing it again. This may sound odd, but the way the controls have been designed ensure that there is satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from pulling off any move, no matter how basic. Marry this with a full scale streaming city in which to get imaginative, and you end up with the distinctly fresh approach of Skate.

Everything about the controls make perfect sense – to perform an ollie (jump away from the ground) in real life, a skater would stamp on the back of the board till it hits the pavement and then shove forward/up again. So in the game, you pull the right analogue stick back and then forward. Easy. You can probably guess how to nollie (jump with the nose of the board instead) – just do the opposite. All other board manipulation is done by moving the stick slightly differently, so a circle move to shove the board 180° underneath the feet from nose to tail, or off at a diagonal to flick the board around it’s long axis. Or to Manual (go along on two wheels), just land with the stick pushed slightly forward or back – this is probably the hardest part of the game, with the need to fight the urge to jam the stick over in any particular direction. At first it’s fairly alien, but soon becomes second nature. Want to grab the board with your right hand? Pull the right trigger. You don’t even have to think about that. Want to grind a rail or kerb or bench? No need for a button – just land on it correctly. Body spins are done with the left stick, as are pumping in pipe transitions (using body movement to gain speed in the bottom of the pipe). So, board on one stick, body on the other. Again, this all makes perfect sense and works sublimely. However, so it’s not too daunting, you don’t need to learn all of this at once. Real skaters dotted around the city give tutorials for each new technique. Linking the tricks together before the multiplier runs out and flicking into the next trick before all four wheels touch down are the keys to massive scores.

The city you ride around is enormous, both in size and in scope for tricks. Freeskating around for hours seeing only new spots is easy and it all streams uninterrupted. To make quicker progress, there are metro stations dotted around, or alternatively good spots can be picked off the map, teleport style, once they’ve been discovered. If there’s a particular spot that needs owning, a tap of the dpad and shoulder button will place a Session Marker, so in the event of a bail or faceplant (or just plain need-to-do-THAT-again) a similar tap will place the rider straight back at the marker, ready to go. This is one of the very few occasions where the game doesn’t quite pull off its ambition: if you’ve skated too far away from the marker, the streamed nature of the city means waiting for a few seconds to get back to that marker.

So we’ve established that there’s endless fun to be had from just skating about, but for those that want a bit more, Skate has more. Firstly there’s the community aspect: upload pics and edited vids from the game to EA Nation where they can be watched and rated by other players or on the internet by anyone with an EA account. The online goodness continues with what has to be one of the coolest multiplayer modes in the history of gaming – the Spot Battle. Who would have thought that taking turns to jump off a ledge and watching five others do the same would have been so much fun? Rest assured it is though (as long as everyone is chatting) – if someone stacks, it’s hilarious. If someone lands a good set, everyone gets hyped and gives out the praise. If someone almost lands a neat trick or two, there’s a chorus of ooooos and aaaahhhs and words of encouragement. Thus far, the public games have been extremely friendly. There’s also point-to-point speed racing and spot racing (do a simple trick in each marked area along the route). An optional ranking system and handful of online achievements add to the depth.

The city is stuffed full of detail, so all that is required to pull off some neat tricks is time and imagination. Use the Multi-story car-park, shopping mall, school, empty swimming pools, city sewers, bridges, gardens, alleyways, steps, benches, sculptures, dustbins, kerbs, walls, rails, anything! Everywhere you look there’s usable street furniture, and pedestrians and cars to avoid. Other areas can be unlocked by playing through parts of the career mode (although many of these can be tried straight away in online games), such as a skatepark in an abandoned warehouse, or a pro-skater's mansion board-riding paradise. Once unlocked they then become accessible in Freeskate mode as well. Working through the career means completing a commendable variety of challenges ranging from photo sessions doing a particular trick in a particular place, film sessions where you choose your spot and tricks, race events, SKATE sessions (like HORSE) taking turns to out-trick a famous skater or competitions where a group of skaters all go at it at once in the same spot. The challenges have a superbly thought through difficulty curve so they gradually nudge the player to try more complex sets. The aim of the career is to get coverage in a couple of skate magazines (after a while other skaters will start to recognise you), acquire sponsors and get invited to the X-games venue with its big-air ramp and massive rails, and the amazing downhill Mega Centre, with its convenient ambulance to take you back to the top.

Whether you want to spend time in the career mode or not, the urge to ignore it and instead just skate around is ever-present, but go online and you can freeskate with other people. This is totally freeform: ride around with a pack, do your own thing whilst occasionally bumping into other people and saying hi, or just stand around watching; it’s all good. This is what the core and vision of Skate is about – freedom and choice. For those that like a rigid structure there’s the career mode, although even that is fairly loose, and for times when you just want to relax, there’s freeskating. You should have realised by now if this sounds like the game for you, so get out and surf those virtual streets. It’s brilliantly conceived, expertly realised and genuinely different. If this is the new direction EA are heading in then we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Score: 10/10