SkateBird

Playing the new game Skatebird is a lot like going back in time to the turn of the millennium. With an extreme attitude and a rebellious soundtrack to match, this is a skateboarding game that will immediately remind you of a very specific moment in time. Unfortunately, that "moment" ends up being a time when an avalanche of terrible Tony Hawk's Pro Skater clones clogged up the PlayStation release schedule and threatened to derail the entire genre. Skatebird is a game that desperately wants to be compared to Hawk's greatest hits, but with horrendous gameplay that is borderline broken, this awful extreme sports game is a lot closer to forgotten crap like The Simpsons Skateboarding and Street Sk8er 2. Trust me, you may want to toss on a helmet and kneepads before watching this review.

Skatebird feels like the kind of game that was created just to make a bunch of bad Tony Hawk jokes. Y'know, because he's the Birdman. And, also because the title sort of sounds like the word skateboard. Get it? Skatebird, skateboard. That's enough of a premise to base an entire game around, right?

Look, as flimsy as the conceit is, I was more than willing to go with it, because I love this type of extreme sports game. I've reviewed practically all of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games in my career and loved many of them, so the prospect of playing a fun parody version with birds and miniature levels was honestly really enticing. I don't care what kind of animal I am; I just want to pull of sick tricks and gnarly combos while listening to angsty punk music. Toss in story about a tiny bird trying to inspire its big human friend to once again pick up the skateboard and you have an adorable premise that definitely sounds like a lot of fun.

As a concept, there's a lot to like about Skatebird. I like how our feathered friend is able to flap its wings to gain a little extra air or grind on levels you would never see in other extreme sports games, including a lot of indoor parks where we're tricking off of halfpipes made out of skateboarding magazines. In that sense, a lot of this game reminds me of the classic tabletop racers I love so much, like Micro Machines. The idea of skating across everyday household items is appealing because it's so different from the typical Tony Hawk level, even if a lot of what you're doing remains the same.

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Much like similar extreme sports games, each of the five skate parks come with their own set of missions to accomplish. You'll recognize a lot of the classics, such as picking up floating letters that spell out S-K-A-T-E, finding memorable gaps and pulling off a massive combo before time runs out. There are also missions that will advance the story and move our little bird one step closer to flying the coop and going to a new skate park. And just like all of those Tony Hawk games, Skatebird also has you tracking down hidden cassette tapes, new skateboards and new items of clothing. In other words, there's a lot to do in all five stages.

The problem I kept running into is that I didn't want to do any of that stuff because the gameplay is often bad to the point of being unplayable. Pulling off simple tricks and even moving around the level proved to be so terrible I started to wonder if there was something wrong with my controller. Or maybe it's the Switch version of the game? I spent a lot of my time hoping that this solid concept played better on PC or other consoles, but I suspect that the obvious answer is the right one -- Skatebird is simply a broken and unplayable mess that never quite came together, even with the delays.

Let's start with the most obvious issue right up front: Your bird is simply too fat to riding that tiny skateboard. To be fair, it's not really the bird's fault, since eagles and owls and parakeets tend to have wider frames that makes balancing on a thin piece of wood rather tricky. Their weird size ends up affecting the skating physics, mostly in terrible ways. It's often hard to keep a combo going or judge landing because of the size of the bird, and I found that the game was surprisingly unforgiving when it came to pulling off tricks.

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Not that there are many tricks to pull off. You get the usual grab tricks, transfers and grinds, as well as a manual that only worked for me about a third of the time. Those early Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games were great about giving you dozens of moves, depending on the direction you're holding and the button being pressed. There's not much of that here. I found myself doing the same two or three moves throughout most of the games, which got old long before I unlocked the second skate park.

It doesn't help that the game does a terrible job of teaching you how to play. There was a moment fairly early in the game where it wanted me to, and I quote, "screm at floor 10 times." Screm? What the hell does Screm mean? Urban Dictionary defines it as an "expression of haste," which doesn't make sense in the context of Skatebird. And it's not like the in-game instruction manual says anything about scremming. I eventually figured it out, but this game is filled with these kinds of confusing moments.

And then there's the camera, which seems like it was designed to work against the player every step of the way. No matter if you're pulling off tricks in the halfpipe or simply trying to skate in a straight line, the camera is constantly confused about what it should be looking at. You might be watching the footage and thinking that I cherry-picked the worst stuff, but I assure you that it's all like this. And you're not even seeing the worst of it, as the camera completely freaks out whenever your little bird gets stuck in the geometry, something that happens all the time.

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It's easy to point the finger at the broken camera, the unresponsive gameplay and the shallow trick book and say that this is what makes Skatebird so bad, but that's only part of the story. Even if all of those problems were to be magically fixed thanks to the power of patches and updates, you would still be left with five mediocre skate parks that aren't much fun to play. Some of them aren't even that different from a typical Tony Hawk's Pro Skater stage, such as the rooftop level. They also reuse a lot of the same magazines and household items, giving the locations a real samey look. And, no, none of this is helped by the ugly graphics and inconsistent frame rate.

As somebody who desperately wants to see the skateboarding genre come back with a vengeance, it brings me no joy to tell you that Skatebird is a terrible game that should be avoided at all cost. It has a silly premise and a lot of the trappings of a Tony Hawk game, but somehow manages to get practically everything wrong along the way. When it comes to skateboarding, the bird is definitely NOT the word.