Preview by: Brian Rowe

For anyone who has ever wanted to pull a 360-flip down a ten-set or blunt slide a rail, minus the shattered ankles and bruised nethers, the Skate series has no equal. Black Box built a reputation by catering to skaters with realistic tricks, physics, and the cranial-crushing results of the two combined. After four hours of rolling through portions of Port Carverton and dominating the multiplayer challenges (that is such a lie), I truly think that the best is yet to come.

I’m sure that you’re anxious to know what the new city, Port Carverton, has in store. Sadly, offering an exact description from the areas I was allowed to explore would be like using a single rock to describe the Grand Canyon. From the looks of the map, there will be suitable replacements for the hills of Cougar Mountain, the high-rises of Downtown, and the campus grounds. In fact, the last two are called, appropriately enough, Downtown and University Hill. There will be an industrial area although I only caught passing glimpses while racing down the slopes of a quarry.

My favorite feature of the Skate series has always been the level-design. It blends the hard edges of the real world with just enough fantasy to elicit Keanu-style “whoahs” as you launch 100ft into the air, followed by your teeth and knees meeting in a gruesome union on the pavement below. Skate 3 seems to follow suit. My fellow previewers and I took turns rolling down the massive, sloped pillars outside an auditorium and soared over a statue with benihanas, backflips, and fastplants. When the novelty wore off, I went back to perfecting laserflips and manuals on an innocuous bench.

My only complaints are that pre-set lines seem to be in greater abundance, as well as a potentially dangerous amount of sloped building-sides. Figuring out how to string two objects together, even if one was a flat wall, was part of Skate’s appeal. In 23 years of skating, I have never come across jersey-barriers with rails, a schoolyard with a bowl, or a drainage ditch with a quarter-pipe. By no means is Skate 3 in danger of morphing into Tony Hawk, but the change is noticeable. Then again, I only saw a few fractions of the final product.