Skate Preview – EA’s open-world reboot feels like coming home

It’s been 15 years since Skate 3, and even longer since the free Xbox Live demo that we all spent too long playing before buying the full game. In the years since, gamers have clamoured for a new entry in the series, largely due to the social media explosion of the last game and less so because they actually played it.

Instead of relying on sales of a base game – which didn’t do so well last time – EA and Full Circle Studio’s new Skate is a free-to-play multiplayer live-service game all about hanging out with friends, pulling off sick tricks and simply having fun. After ten hours of playing the latest game in the series, I don’t see how this thing is going to make any money, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t the most fun free-to-play game in years.

Entering the skater boy paradise of San Vansterdam, you create a skater, take to the streets and simply start skating. While missions will teach you how to use your board and get around, you’re pretty much free from the start, able to explore the city at your pleasure, pull off some sick tricks and have a great time.

Skate is as chill as it always has been. It’s not the rapid, high-score multiplier filled chaos of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and it never has been. EA’s new game feels like a Skate 4 that has always existed, and jumping back into the Flick-It style of skating as you discover intense skate lines across its dense new city feels like coming home again.

While there are new moves to learn and a brand-new story with unique characters, Skate really feels like returning to something you’ve always had. It’s almost uncanny in this regard as, despite the revised controls and smoother framerate it doesn’t feel inherently different to the fifteen-year-old game I’ve been playing for that exact stretch of time.

The one downside is the mission design which feels constructed to offer never-ending gameplay loops instead of some of the fun, personable missions of Skate and Skate 2. Most of your time in the game is skating—or running, or climbing—from mission point to mission point to complete mini-challenges with fans.

However, the fun of Skate comes in the form of exploring its world and finding your own personal skating challenges, or even building them with ramps and grind rails you can place in the world. San Vansterdam is designed specifically for skating with sweeping roads and quirky, modern-art buildings that turn the sides of structures into brilliantly exhilarating skating props.

It helps that your core movement in the 2025 edition of Skate is expanded with the addition of climbing, allowing every structure to be scaled in some way to become a new place to skate. Verticality is massively upgraded over the series’ predecessors, and it feels great to find a spot, climb that spot and then skate off the highest spot you can find.

Even in its early access state, Skate is incredibly well-formed, and with the game’s microtransactions only focused on cosmetics for your skater, it seems that the new live-service open-world skating game is going to be a fantastic place to simply hang out with your friends and pull off some sick tricks.

With more tricks, props and events coming to Skate after launch, EA’s latest is set to improve after launch with even more content. It’s exciting, and the first time we’ve truly had an evolving game in the series. Will it stick the landing? For my money, yes. But will it actually make money? I don’t see how.

Skate (2025) releases on September 16, 2025 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series.