When EA unleashed Skate in 2007, they changed the landscape of the skateboarding video game. The ageing dinosaur that was the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series was easily crushed, with Skate’s serious approach to skateboarding overshadowing the Birdman’s ridiculous over-the-top score-oriented and Jackass-inspired gameplay. Skate 2 adds a number of basic refinements and a trolley load of new tricks, but frustrating goals and a lack of polish hold the game back from achieving glory.

Skate 2 is set roughly five years after the events of the original. Your character has been stuck in jail between games, during which time San Vanelona was levelled by an earthquake (see Skate It on the Wii and DS) and subsequently rebuilt. Skateboarding is reviled in New San Vanelona, which many measures taken to prevent skating on private and public property. A large corporation named Mongocorp is behind this skater-hatred, and happens to have risen to power while you were incarcerated.

Of course, New San Vanelona isn’t the fascist police state that the introduction would lead you to believe, as you’re pretty much free to skate around the city. A few more security guards are present around the game world, and there are a few anti-skater measures, such as metal clips on rails to prevent grinding, but it’s nothing major. In fact, it’s probably safer to just ignore the game’s story, and worry about skating, since the game virtually does the same after about two hours of play.

What players really need to be concerned about is rebuilding their career and becoming the best skater in New San Vanelona. The process for doing so remains much the same as it was in the original game in that players need to raise their profile by completing photo and video shoots, gaining sponsors and defeating pro skaters in competitions and one-on-one challenges. Most challenges grant players a large degree of freedom in how they go about meeting the requirements, so you’ll only need to make a certain score or clear a jump. Some challenges however will require specific tricks, and that can be pretty difficult to accomplish with the game’s analogue trick control, particularly now that there are far more moves in the game than before. The game can seem particularly difficult when you’re just getting started, but after a couple of hours, you’ll be pulling off some mad tricks and lines. Skate 2’s challenges can be a bit glitchy too, allowing players to pass a challenge when they haven’t cleared the requirements, or failing them when they have. The lack of consistency is both strange and irritating. The interface can really get in the way when you’re going through the challenges; the game makes you jump through too many screens in order to retry a line or challenge.

The various challenges of Skate 2 are scattered across New San Vanelona, and players can use the map to warp to each challenge (which isn’t buried under a bunch of menus this time), or make their way manually, either on a skateboard or on foot (or by skitching on the back of a car). Along the way, you can find a number of spots, which you must set a high score on (you can also create your own), as well as a bunch of optional challenges. Being able to get off the board prevents you from needing to strategically Ollie over two inch high gutters or wander off to find a ramp, but the on-foot control could have easily been less cumbersome. While being able to hop off the board is convenient, your skater handles with the same level of grace and agility as a road train.

An additional perk of being able to jump off the skateboard is the ability to move objects around the environment to create your own skate lines or make objectives a little bit easier. The system is fairly easy to grasp – you just hold a shoulder button and drag – but it can be a little clumsy when your object flips after hitting an invisible gutter, or a skater or security guard keeps running into your intricately placed rail while you’re in the middle of a line for a major objective. Collisions of all kinds are a real annoyance in Skate 2; there were countless times where the pedestrians walked into the middle of a trick line, causing a bail. It’s most problematic in the three skater contests; the other two skaters will usually collide into each other at the start, giving you a handy advantage or crash into you seemingly on purpose when the scoring gets a little close.

Skate 2’s trick list has been expanded considerably, and EA Black Box came up with a few nifty ideas to accommodate the new tricks on an already packed system. Most new tricks are accomplished through a series of modifiers based on the position of your feet or how you move the board. The trick system is still much more grounded in reality than that of the Tony Hawk series, but you still have moments where realism is eased off in favour of fun. Doing tricks from high buildings or breaking every bone in your body in a spill isn’t out of the equation.

The multiplayer side of Skate has seen a big boost in the second game. The game types from the original remain, such as best trick, jam sessions, races, spot battles, S.K.A.T.E. and the Hall of Meat, but they’re joined by a new freeskate component, where players can jump into a game with a few other folks and just skate around, or compete in a set of some 149 challenges. Each challenge requires players to do a specific trick or hit a certain part of the line. Each player has to complete the challenge before you can move on. It’s best to play with friends; some random players proved to be rather foul-mouthed and easily irritated when one didn’t complete a trick immediately. Skate 2 also has an online sharing component, where you can upload your photos, footage and created spots to share with the world. Video clips are limited to 30 seconds out of the box, but can be boosted to five minutes with the first downloadable content pack.

Skate 2 runs at a somewhat faster frame rate than the original game, but it’s prone to constant drops. The animation of the skaters still looks great, and the city is well detailed. There are still a few dodgy bits like ugly looking pedestrians and some bad textures, but it looks good overall. The soundtrack is a pretty varied mix of rock, hip-hop and punk, with acts such as Wu Tang Clan, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest representing. The professional skaters deliver the usual half-baked voice performances, and the voice over guy tries and fails to inject his own brand of comedy into the game.

EA Black Box had their work cut out for them delivering a sequel after the original Skate completely changed what people expected from a skateboarding game. Skate 2 has a lot of good features and new additions like the new tricks and online freeskate challenges, but there are some major annoyances that really drag the game back, like poor AI and collision detection, a cumbersome interface and inconsistent controls.