Skater App Review (Android) Is Skater better than True Skate?

Short version: Skater (sometimes called Skater App) is a touch-based physics skateboarding game for phones and tablets, played here on Android. It’s 5 bucks on Google Play with no paid levels, and its big gimmick is a pair of shoes that let you do spin tricks. It miscounts tricks and doesn’t have the “full range of street tricks” it claims, but it’s the one I’d pick over True Skate and Touchgrind.

There’s a new contender for the best mobile skateboarding game, and it’s called Skater. It’s been out for a little while now, and it seems like most of the bugs are worked out. So let’s take a look at it and see how it compares to the other big names.

The shoes

The biggest claim to fame for Skater (or Skater App, as it’s sometimes called) is a pretty weird thing: shoes. Up until now, with other physics-based skateboarding games, it was just a skateboard on screen, and your fingers were your feet. Watching gameplay of Skater, I assumed that those feet would be attached to an invisible person, but they’re actually just disembodied shoes that go flying off when you bail a trick. It’s a little weird, but at least it’s different. They’re doing their own thing.

But the idea behind having shoes is to cram in as many sponsors as you possibly… I mean, it’s so you can do spinning tricks. Now, you can also do spinning stuff in True Skate, but when you do it the whole world spins around, and I actually get motion sick if I play that too much. The spin mechanic in Skater is much better. You drag across the screen to wind up, and then when you pop, you automatically spin when you’re in the air. So you need to flip the board at the right speed in order to catch it at 180 or 360.

Price and the “full range of street tricks”

In the Google Play store, Skater is 5 bucks, which is pretty comparable to the other skateboard games. But it doesn’t have any paid levels. You unlock them as you play, and they’ve also done updates with new, free levels.

In the description in the store, it brags that it’s the “first touch-based skating game to include the full range of street tricks.” I can’t think of a single trick you can do in this game that you can’t do in True Skate. Yeah, doing switch and fakie is a lot harder in True Skate, but still.

And “full range of street tricks” is a bit of an exaggeration. It doesn’t have stuff like casper flips, sex changes or front foot impossibles. I mean, you can do a front foot impossible, but it doesn’t count as anything. It also doesn’t have grabs, there are no darkslides, and the list goes on and on and on.

I mentioned that you can’t do sex changes, and the reason for that is the game doesn’t allow you to scoop your board in the opposite direction of your spin. I wanted to do a hardflip tailslide, but if you rotate backside, the board will not spin frontside. You can still do the trick, but you just have to catch it at the right part, and your feet will jump into place. But that’s only at 90 degrees, and you’re just as likely to have your feet jump in the other direction and do a kickflip noseslide. If you want to do a twisted flip, which is a varial kickflip body varial, then too bad.

Usually this isn’t a problem, but it can cause issues. If you accidentally start a tiny spin, which is easy to do when you’re pushing hard, it will ruin half of the tricks you might try. A bunch of times I started pushing toward a gap and then couldn’t do my trick because it was the wrong direction.

Also, impossibles are really weird. They don’t wrap, which is kind of a waste of having feet on screen. And if you do one just a little bit off-axis, you can do a crazy 720 shove-it that doesn’t count as anything.

Real spots and matching tricks

OK, now that we’ve talked about what the game doesn’t do, let’s talk about what it does.

Skater is all about being able to session famous, real-life spots and match tricks that other people have done. When you start up a level for the first time, you’re tasked with setting a number of tricks and saving them, and also matching tricks that other people did. The way this is supposed to work, there will always be new challenges for you. In practice, you’ll see the same few tricks over and over, and you’ll also see your own stuff a lot. I know a lot of people are playing this game, and it requires you to set new tricks, so it’s a little strange that there isn’t more variety.

For the sake of realism, a lot of these spots are really small. Carlsbad, for example, is just the famous gap. If you go too far in any direction, you’ll hit an invisible wall. It’s cool that they wanted to make it as real as possible, so you can get the feeling of actually skating there, but I would have liked it if they went Tony Hawk style and added some extra stuff to it: some more benches, a DIY quarter pipe. Just something you can make a line out of.

Sometimes the game counts your trick wrong in a really subtle way. One guy set an ollie manual, impossible out, but the game counted it as a 5-0. When I tried to match it, 5-0s and manuals caused me to instantly fail.

You’ll also spend a lot of time matching random stationary flatground tricks. It’s hard to blame the game for this, because they’re user submitted, but it’s still annoying.

Setting your own tricks

I don’t mind too much anyway, because it’s a lot more fun to set your own tricks than to match stuff. But you have to be careful and make sure it’s actually possible to match before you submit.

For one set, I did a frontside shove-it over the gap, but when I went to watch it back and actually save it, I noticed that it didn’t count the shove-it at all. It did count a random nose manual that I didn’t even do. I could still post it, but nobody would actually want to do it.

So I tried it again. The front shove counted, but it still did that weird nose manual, and it counted my fakie 540 flip as a hardflip for some reason. It’s like it couldn’t decide if it was switch or fakie, so it just did both. So I didn’t save that one either.

I decided to switch the tricks up a little and hope that it would work better, this time with a varial double flip. It still had the nose manual, but at that point I figured that if it’s happening that often, then whoever tries to match it will get a random nose manual too and it will work out.

Another issue, especially on transition, is that your feet will change directions a lot. So you’ll do a straight trick to fakie, and your feet will spin around and you’ll land regular. Or you’ll do a 360 trick and somehow land switch. I wouldn’t have thought that feet were this hard to program, but this must be the reason nobody else has attempted to add them.

And it’s an issue because you can’t set a 360 and then a switch flip. There’s no way to turn around, so whoever matches it will just have to run into the same glitch in order to complete the trick. Or they’ll have to randomly bounce and spin around too, which also happens sometimes.

One last issue with setting tricks is the way grinds work. If you watch the video closely, you’ll see a lot of mislabeled grinds, and that’s because they don’t really lock in very well. So you’ll land in something like a tailslide, but by the end of the trick you’ve drifted into a lipslide, and it still counts it as a tailslide. Or a 50-50 slowly becomes a crooked grind, and it still technically counts as a 50-50. It’s not a big deal as long as, when you’re matching, you match what it says the trick is and not what it looks like.

Games of SKATE and gear

Is there anything else you can do in Skater? Well, you can play games of SKATE, but only by passing the game back and forth. If you and your friends all play, that could be fun.

You can also customize your board, but just by picking premade completes. I’m sure there’s some kind of weird sponsorship agreement or something that explains why you can’t mismatch decks, trucks and griptape. It’s good enough, but when you run into a saved run with the same board and shoes as you, it’s a little weird. The gear is all cheap enough to buy with stars that you earn as you play. I really appreciate that they aren’t twisting your arm for more money the whole time, like True Skate does.

Touchgrind vs. True Skate vs. Skater

OK, so which game is the best: Touchgrind, True Skate or Skater?

I still think Touchgrind has the best game experience, where they guide you through progressively difficult challenges. But True Skate has the best physics and trick selection, although not by much. The real question, though, is: what will I still be playing in a couple of months? And I’ve gotta say… Skater. I really hope they address some of the issues that I mentioned, but even so, it’s the most complete skateboarding experience you can get on your phone or tablet. You can’t go wrong with any of these games, but if I had to pick one, it’s gotta be Skater.

Is there any other game I need to try as well? When I made this video, there was a new one coming out called LRN2, with Greg Lutzka doing motion-captured tricks for it. I didn’t know much about it yet, but I’ll definitely give it a try.