The extreme-sports boom of the 90s may be long dead but there’s still a lot of fun to be had tearing up the town while building the perfect line. Skater XL has been working the Early Access beat over on Steam for the last eighteen months, slowly updating itself while major work went on in the background and the community stepped up with endless mods. All that quiet effort is about to pay off now that Skater XL has a release window, and it comes with a good picture of the trick-riding game’s final form.
Skater XL is a skateboarding game with a fairly unique control scheme, in that each of the two analog sticks on the controller is in charge of an individual foot, generating tricks on the fly as you kick and flip the board around. The game straddles a line between realism and arcade in its gameplay, and while the environments have also been real-world settings today’s trailer reveals just how much of that you’ll get to shred. Skater XL in its current form doesn’t have a particularly big map but that’s about to change with multi-block setting of downtown LA, which is fifteen times bigger than the current environment. I’ll grant that watching the skater trick through the big empty spaces was both nostalgic and creepy, as I recognized (and want to skate through) areas I’ve walked back when I used to go to E3, but also got hit with a strong vibe of life in the time of the death-virus. Which isn’t the tone Skater XL is going for, of course, but 2020 isn’t being kind to anyone.
Skater XL is coming to all platforms in June- Xbox One, PS4, Switch, and will graduate from Early Access on PC. In addition to a robust create-a-skater it will also have the real-world pros Tom Asta, Tiago Lemos, Evan Smith and Brandon Westgate to play as. It’s a big wide world with more cities to come and a modding community that’s only going to get richer once the full release has arrived, so give the trailer a look to get a feel for the LA skateboarding scene.
