Famous skater Tony Hawk became a household name via a line of skating games that emphasized freedom and quirkiness, but pro skating personality Nyjah Houston wants to take a different route, with an official mobile game that boasts context-based controls, fixed tracks and a cinematic presentation that puts even the prettiest Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater runs to shame. This is not the highly technical SKATE, either; players will find the simple, intuitive controls to be a rewarding mechanism to pull off a limited set of sick stunts on some of the most beautiful skate courses that the mobile sphere has yet seen, with some impressive camera angles helping to boost the aesthetic appeal and reflexive reward mechanism that keeps players engaged.
The game’s tutorial condenses it pretty nicely. You start off on a set course toward a bench, which you must tap to ollie. Once you’ve done that, you head for a half-pipe, which turns you back toward the bench. Tap again to pull off another glorious sunlit ollie and coast triumphantly onward, or ignore the bench and watch your avatar smash into the obstacle and ragdoll hilariously to the ground. Your options aren’t always quite that limited, of course; the intuitive controls do grant you access to a nice variety of tricks, but only the ones the game feels are appropriate to your scenario. You can’t, for example, manual and no comply into a 540 melon grab then indy plant on the lip instead of dropping back in, but you can fly dramatically into the air and let the setting sun lend a golden light to your perfectly-timed double kickflip. There are a number of obstacles and environments to play around with, further ensuring that no two mostly on-rails sessions are exactly the same.
Skateboarding games on the Play Store are extremely common and fill in a number of niches, but this one takes special care in the presentation to convey just how epic each grab, flip and stall is. The whole experience is actually pretty similar to the trailer attached below, albeit with a slightly less dramatic camera angle that makes it easier to actually play. If that grabs your interest, use the Google Play button at the bottom of the article to grab the game for free and get shredding.
