Session Review — The Dark Souls of Skateboarding Games

Session is gruelling, tricky, and features a notable learning curve, but it’s also easily one of the most satisfying, rewarding, and cleverly-made skateboarding games ever.

Session, which comes from Canadian developer Crea-ture Studios, was touted as the spiritual successor to EA’s beloved Skate and its sequels, but it’s fair to say that Session takes the ideas of its inspiration, and doubles-down on them, adding an even more intricate trick system utilising the two analogue sticks as your front and back feet respectively.

The result is something far more conscious and meticulous, compared to something like the often-referenced Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. Whereas in THPS, you’d be zipping around the level racking up huge combos, Session is all about exploring, finding a spot, and trying (and trying) to land a single trick.

Of course, this is a skateboarding game, so you can cruise around the world and hit a rail, flip down some stairs, and clear some barriers, but it’s a true-to-form street-skating experience, requiring you to find a spot to pull off a required trick or sequence, which is half the fun.

You can do most of the objectives anywhere in the open world, but it’s up to you to cruise around (jump off your board if need be), and find that perfect set of stairs or ramp to give you the height, breadth, or rail to deliver the goods.

There’s a marker system that allows you to place a starting point (usually the top of a set of stairs with a decent run-up), which you can warp back to when you inevitably fall. Finding a great spot in the game, setting up shop (so to speak), placing your markers and getting your timing right feels like you’re setting up your tent, lighting the fire, and preparing to slam the concrete time and time again until you nail that backside boardslide — and it’s great.

Landing a complex trick is oh-so-satisfying, so much so, that you’ll often find yourself immediately jumping into the instant editor suite, and building your own skate video to show off to your friends. This trial, error, and eventual success, gameplay loop is incredibly rewarding, and even though you’ll want to throw your controller at the wall after getting thumb-tied at some of the trick combinations, when it does click, there’s nothing quite like it.

And skateboarding is only as good as the culture and ethos around it, and Session definitely manages to capture that laid-back street skating milieu. The soundtrack is great, and while it doesn’t have a list of big-name artists that’ll rival Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2‘s iconic jams, it’s got a wealth of looping beats and tracks that tie in nicely with the slower and more concerted approach.

Visually, the game looks good running on Unreal Engine 4, with detailed textures and impressive lighting across the cityscape world. There are so many little benches, lips, nooks and crannies, and having these assets key to what you interact with makes you appreciate the level of detail so much more. The ragdoll physics which kick in after bailing do deliver some goofy results as the slick animated characters’ transition from solid to lifeless is always hilarious.

With that said, the minimalist approach with little-to-no HUD, points multipliers or distracting interface is a refreshing change to the number and XP-littered games on the market currently, and perfectly captures the beautiful serenity of skateboarding, which can actually be quite relaxing.

Furthermore, with a dynamic, physics-based game like this, it’s expected that some clipping and bugs do pop up, especially when you are landing on rails awkwardly. With that said, Session is a great addition to a genre which seemed to have the ‘styles’ of skateboarding games all wrapped up. It definitely brings something new that fans of Skate will enjoy, and will likely be considered the more ‘technical’ and intricate game for hardcore skateboarding enthusiasts.

Session is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC.