Xboxaddict.com Article
Session - Game Preview
by Adam Dileva
Let’s be honest, when you think about skateboarding games, I’d wager that the first that comes to most people’s minds is the Tony Hawk series. Sure, if you’ve been gaming long enough you might think of some others like Skate, 720 on NES, OlliOlli or maybe Skate or Die depending on the era of gaming you grew up with, but there’s no denying that there’s a certain fondness when it comes to the sport in gaming.
While the Tony Hawk skateboarding games were fantastic in their own rights, it wasn’t a real representation of what actual skateboarding is like in a realistic way, more of an arcade vision. The Skate series more leaned towards the realism aspect, blending that simulation and arcade feeling. Well, Session has been a long time coming but is finally here in early access with the Xbox Game Preview program. This is a way developers can let you play the game early in its development cycle as it gets updates over time, getting closer to its final product and full launch in the future. We were fortunate enough to get our hands on with this early version of Session and was intrigued by what we played.
Session is a skateboarding simulator. There’s no arcade gameplay here, so don’t expect to be chain comboing across rooftops, caspering over vehicles and doing a 100x combo. Session feels raw, depicting the true way skating happens when you’re going from one area on the local streets to the next. The 90’s were a magical time for skateboarding, as it seems it was insanely popular at the time. I clearly remember trying to find any VHS tapes I could showing all the famous skater’s pulling off insane tricks. This was realistic though, so a crazy trick meant one huge kickflip over a gap, or maybe a very long grind across some waxed bars. That’s what real skating is, and if you go back and watch footage from the 90’s, it was a whole different era.
Session is what true skating is all about, simply flowing and going from one place to the next however you desire, pulling off a trick here and there, landing them and hopefully filming it along the way for your friends. While it’s still very early in development, I could make a laundry list of technical issues and bugs, but that’s not what Game Preview is all about. This Preview is about the idea of what Session will hopefully be when it gets its final release in the future. It’s very early on and clearly has a long way to go, but after a few hours of frustratingly learning its controls, Session finally ‘clicked’ and I was hooked.
Recently on February 17th, Session received a pretty sizeable and important update which is where my Session career began, so I’m unable to speak to how the game was before this major update. Famous skate spot in New York, Jerome Avenue Banks, was recently added, adding more locales to play around in and carve your favorite special spots. Also added were new skaters and a bunch of optional features an improvements, including many experimental features and additions that aren’t completely ready yet, but can be toggled to let you play around with and try out.
Session is polarizing in the sense that you’re going to have a strong opinion about it within its opening moments in the tutorial. While the gameplay does feel like a truly authentic skating game, the controls are not conventional in any way and I truly struggled with wrapping my head around its design choice initially. Utilizing dual sticks, where each one represents your feet, I seriously struggled for honestly the first few hours trying to grasp the controls.
In most games you move with the Left Stick. That’s just how it is, how it’s always been, so why would someone change this. Session changed this, and I admit I initially absolutely hated it. Meant to replicate how skating actually is, Left and Right Sticks will control your legs on the board, meant to transfer your weight, which is how you do tricks and skate in real life. So if you’re using both sticks for your legs, how do you steer and move? I’m glad you asked. The Triggers are how you lean and choose to move left or right with your skater. That’s right, you steer with the triggers as you use the Sticks to actually do the tricks on the board. Let that sink in, and once you think you’ve grasped it, your brain is going to fight you for the first hour and you’re going to struggle in the beginning, believe me.
My kneejerk reaction was thinking how terrible of a design this was, as it didn’t feel natural at all. I kept messing up because I wanted to move my skater with the sticks. Then something weird started happening; I was starting to get it. I don’t know what caused the sudden ‘click’ in my brain, but I suddenly understood it and I started to actually understand the reasoning and being able to actually pull of tricks how I originally intended. Believe me, once you get passed that wall of frustration and constant bailing of your tricks, it’ll start to come together.
Session is a simulator, so you need to know how you’re going to move your feet based on what you want to do. Like riding a real board, to do an Ollie for example where you simply ‘bunny hop’ usually over an object, you’ll need to press down on your back foot to transfer weight to it, and when you want to jump you slide your front foot up the board as you ‘pop’ up, causing the board to lift up. If you’ve ever skateboarded before this will make complete sense to you, and while I haven’t skateboarded in probably two decades, I understood what it was trying to recreate. So depending on where your back and front feet placements are and how you ‘flick’ the sticks, which will determine what tricks you perform. Again, this will take at least an hour or two to get, but once you do it eventually all makes sense.
That said, it may feel unintuitive at first, but there are numerous control options for you to play around with, and you can even change your default stance from regular to goofy which determines which your front foot is. Because Session is a simulator, expect the physics to be realistic as well. That means you can forget everything the Tony Hawk games taught you, as you’ll be elated when you can Kickflip over a gap or down a ledge and stick the landing. There are multiple difficulty levels and more than enough options for you to play around with, even able to change certain aspects from physics, friction and much more.
While there are currently two cities to skate around, New York and Philadelphia, they are what real skating is all about when you simply grab your board and head out into the streets to go from one place to the next. There are a few spots that are more dedicated for skating with some ramps, rails and objects to do tricks from, but the city landscape gives Session that raw kind of feeling, like skating around the city until you see that perfect stairway that you want to try and do a trick down its rail.
Session feels like how 90’s skate videos appeared, and you can recreate this as well if you want. Fisheye lens were extremely popular back then as skaters would have friends film their tricks, creating a compilation video to share around, usually with a punk soundtrack to lay overtop. You can film and record your skating sessions like this or in a variety of ways to create similar era styled clips as well. Want to practice nailing that perfect trick? You can set a respawn spot and easily rewind back to it to try all over again as many times as you want until you land that perfect trick for your highlight reel.
While you’re able to customize your skater, this is an area that still needs a lot of work. The character options are quite limited, and if I’m being honest, are dated at best. You’ll also find skate shops where you can purchase new clothing and parts for your board like new decks, wheels, trucks and more. There are currently a few name brands for parts included, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more added in the future as launch gets closer.
If online multiplayer got added, I could absolutely see myself and some friends getting together for some skate nights, trying to outdo one another. Even better, if I was able to join a friend and skate around him filming his tricks to make a skate video, that would be a great time.
There’s a ton of bugs and it’s nowhere near finished, yet I had a great time grinding and popping tricks in Session once I got over the gargantuan mounting of learning the unique controls. Session is truly a skateboarding simulation and has the potential to be something really unique. It has laid the framework for a really interesting skateboarding game, and while it’s still very early in development, I’m definitely going to keep tabs on updates for future sessions.
**Session (Game Preview) was provided by the publisher and previewed on an Xbox Series X**
