Skate 3 is the Smash Bros Melee of skateboarding games, in the best way possible.

You've all seen PewDiePie and Markiplier's videos about the game, its broken as fuck, but that broken-ness leads to an experience you can't have anywhere else if you look beneath it's surface level mechanics, and utilize its myriad bugs to elevate its skill ceiling to the heavens.

Let's be real, it's nowhere NEAR realistic skating whatsoever, like most people who like the game think it is, and its also nowhere near the arcade experience of Tony Hawk Pro Skater either. Skate 3 (unlike Skater XL or Session) is a very fun and delicate balance of """realism""" and arcadeyness that grounds you in the feet of the skater you're playing as while also giving you the immense power fantasy of being able to chain together treflips and nose manuals over and over to get a ridiculously high 15,000 point line, possibly up to 100,000 if you're really good at playing the game (shoutout to Skate 3 comp players by the way).

Yeah, there's competitive gameplay in Skate 3. No it isn't esports level, but there are minute optimizations that you can do to maximize points you earn in a line, like moving your right stick so it appears like you're about to land in a nose-manual and then immediately doing your next trick to cancel the nose-manual and keep your score rising by doing nollie hardflip dark-catches and treflip dark-catches and so-on and so forth (this is called five-popping and infinite-popping), which allows people to build insane lines of tens of thousands of points and allows high level players set records of 15k points across all session spots online. Combine this with the quite frankly utterly broken and bug-ridden state of the game leads to a transcendent playstyle that pushes the limits of the engine known as tricklining, where you manipulate your board and player avatar to do speed glitches that send you tearing it up at 9 million miles an hour while you do off-axis body flips and finger flips and land in transition and nose-manual, among a billion other things you can do. Tricklining is probably the ultimate way to play Skate 3, as it combines all of the knowledge you can get from tinkering around with the game, such as popping to keep a high score, speed glitches to send you flying across the map, as well as basic map knowledge to know where to set up your trickline so you don't bail out and embarass yourself.

There is so much emergent gameplay underneath the surface of Skate 3 that makes it so unique to play compared to other games, and literally all of it is the result of Skate 3 being basically crunched into release and launching incredibly broken. It truly is the Smash Bros. Melee of skateboarding games.

Most other people have harped on about how good the game is and I don't really have much to add about this game outside of this rambling review, but there is more to this game than just "realism" and "haha funny pewdiepie reaction to bugs". I doubt Skate 4 is going to be broken in the exact perfect way Skate 3 was (its being made on Frostbite so its guaranteed to be broken in the worst way imaginable), so play Skate 3, it's really good when you break it.