Skate 3

4 / 5 stars
Xbox 360/PS3; £39.99; cert 16+; Black Box/EA
Skate 3
Skate 3 … a ramped up social element encourages you to form an online skate crew PR

It can be painful, as well as inspiring, when you see a pupil becoming the master. Activision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise put skateboarding games on the map, but went from decline to disaster with last year's all-but-unplayable Tony Hawk: Ride. Meanwhile, deadly rival EA's Skate arrived on the scene, initially with little but a more logical control system (largely eschewing button-presses in favour of both analogue joysticks) to recommend it. However, Skate has steadily improved and its third incarnation marks the point at which it leaves the opposition in the gutter, most likely nursing two broken ankles and in dire need of an ambulance.

Skate 3 has plenty of new elements, most notably a massively ramped up social element, which encourages you to form an online skate crew with your mates, and take on rival teams (co-operative online play even speeds your passage through the single-player side). There's an incredibly powerful skate park editor, enormous flexibility when it comes to customising anything to do with your skate team, new tricks (including the Darkslide, where you grind with your board upside-down so you must end it with a flip) and a glorious set of diverse challenges. These include Own That Spot, where you must pull off high-value tricks in specific places; photography and video challenges, where you must perform specific tricks in specific places; Pro challenges, where you follow pros lines or play squash-like games of 1-Up with them; races; and several types of contests (often sponsored by the same brands active in the real-life skateboarding world – if product placement worries you, you'll hate Skate 3).

The hilarious Hall Of Meat, in which you launch yourself like a human rag doll in a bid to break as many virtual bones as possible, has been ramped up, giving you amazingly fine control over your self-immolation. Each completed challenge breeds sales of the board you designed, milestones open up new areas and challenges and downloads of photos and videos of your skills in action add to those board sales.

As in previous versions of Skate, the control system leaves you feeling much more connected to your board than in rival games, and you have to work much harder to nail high-value tricks. But the real star of the game is Port Carverton, the fictional city in which Skate 3 is set. It is, quite simply, a skater's dream, with vertigo-inducing vertical sections, skate parks everywhere, an abandoned shipyard and an unfeasible amount of rails, ledges and ramps. If it were real, it would have long since been abandoned by all non-skaters.

Skate 3 is meaty, has lashings of the attitude and ambience that skaters demand and is hugely addictive. It is, by some distance, the best skateboard game yet, and is surely destined to achieve cult-classic status.