Hands on with Skate It iPhone

I’ve always been terribly disappointed when I catch professional skateboarding competitions on TV.

It’s all the fault of my unhealthy addiction to the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series on the PS2. Now I can’t help but imagine skateboards as something that can stick to railings like glue and fly hundreds of feet into the air without so much as a nudge.

EA’s Skate home console series has done its best to blast my idiotic conceptions of the sport/hobby, however, with a far more realistic simulation of board-on-wheels action that makes pulling off just a ‘normal’ trick something to celebrate.

Now, the critically acclaimed series comes to the iPhone in the form of Skate It, which not only promises to deliver a far more representative version of skating than its competitors, but also proclaims that you can ‘own challenges and KILL [sic] them’ in the official press release.

We went hands on with the game to find out what the heck that sentence means.

The level we were able to try our skating prowess on for the preview was an attractive looking, if grey and lonely, skate park, although the fictional ‘skating nirvana’ of San Vanelona, which looks suspiciously like parts of San Francisco, also makes an appearance in the full game.

It would be a little dull to ride around these areas without much of a purpose, although there is a free ride option if you really want to.

Instead, the bulk of Skate It is spent trying to rack up impressive displays of trickery to impress sponsors, overcome challenges, beat other pro skaters, and unlock new equipment.

Don't expect to be grinding down the same rail for hours, though, as Skate It eschews the standard virtual D-Pad or joystick controls favoured by the competition like Gameloft’s Skater Nation for an almost direct replica of the DS version’s controls.

This takes the form of a 'virtual skateboard' that materialises on screen when you touch the centre, with the manner in which you sweep your fingers across the screen relating to the positioning of the feet in real life.

This means that a sweep up or down results in a jump (or an ollie/nollie if you like that sort of thing), whereas drawing a ‘z’ shape randomly across the board doesn’t do anything, much to my disappointment.

It’s not a direct correlation with feet movements, but it does feel more engaging than simply hitting the correct buttons or magically latching onto the nearest railing.

New in the iPhone iteration of Skate It is the integration of the accelerometer to change the balance and steer your skater.

Tilting hard to the right while entering a jump, for instance, pulls the board around into a spin, which when combined with the foot movements is suitably tough to time and land.

Grabs, activated by touching the 'hand' symbol in the top left corner of the screen, add to the complexity. To say that I fell over a lot during the hands on would be an understatement.

Yet while the controls seem slightly overwhelming at first, there are a few helpful aids to ease the learning curve and get you back on the board with new-found confidence.

Along with a ‘Trick Book’, otherwise known as a control guide, Skate It comes with an interesting looking restart system, designed to ease the pain of a mis-timed grind or an over-ambitious 360 tail grab.

As you skate across the various environments you can lay down a marker that enables you to almost instantly skip back to that position with a few touches.

It doesn’t sound like an amazing feature on paper, but the almost instantaneous speed at which it restarts is incredibly handy if you’ve found a good line but can’t quite string the right tricks together.

There’s also a neat playback feature that, like the restart, can be activated surprisingly quickly with very little loading time.

Tilting the iPhone during the replays allows you to move the camera, so you can line up the perfect shot of your impressive front-side grind/face hitting a rail for gloating/crying to a friend.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much the extent of showing off your moves to friends as there are no multiplayer modes across either 3G or wi-fi, which is always a disappointment.

Despite this, Skate It is shaping up to be an interesting addition to the iPhone’s slowly growing skateboard sub-genre.

Will the focus on the execution of tricks be enough to make Skate It KILL the competition? We’ll find out when the game is released on the App Store in May.