Session: Skate Sim

Sim games approach their subjects with a mix of reverence and intense focus. Unlike more arcade-style skateboarding games, Session is a pure, unfiltered experience. If you want to recreate the slow, careful process of learning how to skate, this is your game. But be warned! The mix of intense difficulty and self-directed gameplay isn’t for everyone. Anything less than a pure, powerful love for skateboarding will leave you feeling dissatisfied with this game. But if you’re looking for a pure challenge, and don’t mind a few bugs, you’re in luck. Session: Skate Sim is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.

Session: Skate Sim is the ultimate skateboard simulator, but also a video game with several shortcomings.

Session: Skate Sim is the most authentic skateboarding experience you can get from a video game. Though you will fall down (a lot) and may get frustrated, you will undoubtedly leave this experience with a greater appreciation for skating and the culture that surrounds it.

Session's ultra-realistic skating mechanics are spot-on and reward your practice and patience. However, it's set in a world that feels a little dead, empty and cold at times and the structure the game does give you isn't particularly interesting or user-friendly.

This skateboarding simulation will really torture you. Hardcore players will enjoy it, others not so much. Session: Skate Sim is just an unfinished version of a project with good ideas.

If you are new to skateboarding, chances are Session: Skate Sim will frustrate you more than impress you, but if you live for the board, it will provide you with an unrivaled simulator worth playing.

It’d be nice if the game did more in the way of teaching you the ropes, offered different control schemes, and provided a wider array of accessibility options. In general as well, it’d be nice if the game offered more in the way of incentives, excitement, and action to keep you coming back for more, regardless of its punishing difficulty.

An unapologetically tricky ode to street skating, Session is packed with a palpable love for the sport, but bugs and unsympathetic tutorial and mission design decisions undermine its approachability.

With a steep learning curve and bland presentation, Session: Skate Sim ends up being a mixed package.

The mission structure of the game devolves into going to a place, doing a trick or route, strung along by forgettable story dialogue. The missions have a habit of being poorly explained, furthered by being unable to re-read text boxes explaining what you need to do. And rarely do the inputs needed for specific moves get shown during these prompts. For better or worse, Session is a game for the hardcore skater. While its dedication to realism is impressive, the frustration in the early hours is likely to turn most off.

Session: Skate Sim is a game of two halves at the moment. It presents a daunting, yet rewarding challenge that genuinely tries to move the genre forward through its dedication to being an authentic sim, but at the same time lacks the character and anarchy that the genre and skateboarding, in general, are synonymous with. Add onto that a healthy serving of jank and bugs, and Session: Skate Sim becomes a hard sell. However, if you can look past its flaws and are down for a challenge, it’s worth giving a shot as the innovations it does present are worth experiencing, and the highs you will receive from mastering the complex controls are unlike anything else the genre has to offer.