Battle Mode Levels Ranked Worst to Best:

6. Palm Shore
Driving through the water is annoying and ruins the pace of a match.

5. Tart Top
Pretty basic - not helped by the fact that the item boxes are only in 1 area. You can still have fun here, but the level itself is pretty forgettable.

4. Nintendo DS
For the sake of variety, it’s cool having 1 open course with few obstacles to focus on the items. It’s similar to Baby Park in that sense, though obviously not as small. Besides that, the theming is just really cool.

3. Twilight House
Getting really good now! I like the endgame on this level when there are only 2 players left. The short sightlines make it so that, for a few moments, it’s not fully clear when you’ll find and fight your opponent, which creates this brief sense of anticipation. You can also fall off the edge if you’re not careful.

2. Block Fort
There are lots of subsections to chase opponents around, and amazing verticality. If you get triple shells, it’s really funny to jump on top of some unsuspecting NPC on the floor below. I feel like this or Nintendo DS would’ve been my favourite if I’d played MKDS as a kid.

1. Pipe Plaza
This map is quite small, and so it’s probably the most chaotic battle course in the game. Almost nowhere is safe; you have to be extra careful of your surroundings, especially when blowing up a balloon. I usually try to blast out of the pipe teleporter and place a banana upon landing, so when another racer takes the teleporter they get hit.

(Played the demo version)

Despite clear inspiration from Tony Hawk, being a mobile game makes Perfect Grind not completely derivative. You swipe / hold the screen in certain directions to do tricks, and so the core mechanics are more involved than their inspiration. Think of it as a simplified version of fingerboarding. Maintaining a combo is slightly more challenging than just pressing the right buttons. Because of that, a flow state is achieved as there is in THPS, despite the limited set of tricks and shorter combos. I actually spent a decent amount of playtime just doing some flip-late-flip variations on flatground, because the controls were fun even when ignoring the obstacles. They use the functional limits of a touchscreen to make something satisfying.

The game is really short, with the full version only having 4 levels plus custom parks. I think there could also be more polish. For example, going off of big ramps can feel a bit random as to where you land. But overall, this is a good option if you’re interested in arcadey skating on the go.