Skate 3 Preview

The third installment in the Skate series from EA Black Box, Skate 3 picks up where you left off in Skate 2. Your character – having saved skateboarding in San Vanelona has decided its time to move on to pastures new, bringing players to the town of Port Carvelton, and unlike San Vanelona skateboarding is welcomed.

With a new town and new spots to conquer, Skate 3 also takes a new story focus, it’s time to start your own skate company and it’s time to assemble your own crew.

Whilst at first thought it seems Black Box have taken a detour away from what makes Skate so great – the skating, but actually the game focuses on the social side of running a skate company, with the story and goals of the game focused around building the brand of the company by building a team and showcasing your skills.

One of the cooler features of this new story focus is the online aspect, when the time comes to choose your team, if you have Xbox Live you can recruit team members through your friends list. You can play the game cooperatively with your friends and when they’re offline the AI controls them, they still look like your friends character and still skate like them.

Skate 3 vastly improves upon the online features of the Skate series, it adds new modes such as Domination where you have to control spots by performing the most tricks inside them, 1-Up which is our personal favorite, a turn based game where two teams compete in 20 second rounds trying to out do each other by scoring more points and Own the Lot where random challenges are assigned to the area you choose to skate.

Black Box also promised improvements to the actual game play with a more smooth experience off your board, a new training mode titled Skate School designed to help newcomers to the series get to grips with the Flick It control system and a new feature suite called Skate Create an “innovative tool set that empowers gamers to truly express their skate style by creating their own graphics, videos, and skate parks”.

Skate 3 will be released on Xbox 360 and PS3 in May 2010, pre-order the game to get a bonus in-game area called Black Box Distribution Skate Park.

Watch the trailer below: