izigame.me

Coming from the Skate series, Skater XL's split-foot, dual thumbstick controls were an impressive step forward considering how revolutionary Skate's "flick-it" controls already were to begin with. You actually have to think about your stance and foot placement and adjust your inputs accordingly. The physics-based animations allow for a ton of tweaking of tricks that mean the exact same line can be executed in a hundred different ways. No trick/combo/line score meter means you are purely skating for the tricks you want to actually land, and you have to actually work to land those tricks. This is a brilliant combination of technology and mindset that has clearly come from the brains of real-world skaters and it translates really well to emulating real-world skating.
But for all the fun and style you can get out of the board control in this game, you absolutely HAVE to mod it if you want anything approaching realistic physics. Otherwise, be prepared to fly over objects and then float to the ground at roughly 3/5ths actual gravity because there is no "baby pop" function in vanilla and we're apparently skating on the moon rather than Earth here. The standard pop is massive and you can't fully pre-load up your shoulders to spin without doing a "high pop"; here meaning a world record-breaking pole-vault jump. You'll get used to it but it will definitely frustrate you until you compromise.
Thank gawd for DawgVinci who has single-handedly taken this game so far beyond the developers' wildest dreams both in terms of trick selection and realism. Without his XXL mod this game loses its lustre incredibly fast. Look into the controversy with Easy Day Studios banning him if you really want to know where their priorities lie (they apparently do not like being shown up by more passionate and dedicated Unity devs).
As a mapper, grind splines are the most annoying function in the game. Here comes my first comparison to the other 2020's skate sim on the market; mapping for Session is 100% easier because every edge is inherently grindable and maps won't break upon building them just 'cause you dared to move a single vertex out of place, or the spline generation tool decided to ♥♥♥♥ itself for no discernible reason. See that random air vent duct on a roof in XL? You can't grind it unless someone went to the trouble of adding a spline to it, which 90% of the time they haven't. In Session you can grind the LAPTOP in the skate shop if you really want to.
As a player, you'll notice very frequently that trying to ollie onto ledges will lock you into a grind even though you're nowhere near the edge of the ledge, purely because the spline hitboxes are for the most part a bit cooked, at least in maps available in-game. Perfect example is the long curved ledge leading to the carpark in Easy Day High School. You can be half a meter in from the edge of the ledge and it will still force you into a grind or slide. Landing flat on your wheels in the middle of a ledge and still being forced into 50-50 is utterly ridiculous. There are also broken splines on maps like Downtown L.A. and Applewood Park that have been reported years ago and never fixed, meaning those rails simply cannot be grinded; you'll just bounce right off them or instantly bail. Don't expect fixes for them, they just aren't coming.
Compare that to Session where you MUST manually 'lock in' to a grind with the thumbsticks, giving you the choice to actually ollie up onto tight ledges and whatnot, and you'll see the sloppiness that this insistence on grind splines creates. Going back to control schemes, I also feel like Session's split-foot dual-thumbstick controls go one better than XL's, which is obviously already a big improvement on Skate's single thumbstick control scheme. For example, in XL you flick up on the left thumbstick to pop in switch stance. In Session, you flick down, because flicking up will pop fakie. As someone who enjoys ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around in switch stance IRL, Session simply makes much more sense here.
The in-game objectives here are just laughable; you may as well completely ignore them and set your own goals. It's no wonder XL got stuck with a mid-50s metascore because there's simply no real game to actually critique; anyone writing this off as a "tech demo" is very much justified. I happen to really enjoy this tech demo but it will be a deal-breaker for many. At least Session actually attempts to build a game with a hint of actual progression and story around its mechanics, though it struggles in terms of user generated content compared to Skater XL. It also has a built-in stats menu in vanilla; XL doesn't bother, despite having been fully released years earlier and the number one request from players being "please please please implement a stats menu". Modded XL is heavily customizable but it WILL take effort on your part to get it to a properly satisfying state and patches will break those mods. Session also has a more robust replay editor, though XL's is no slouch.
Finally, multiplayer XL is one of its most compelling features to me; no objectives, no trick scores, just pure skating with ya mates. It's really quite chill and relaxing, though the vast majority of players are not going to have the same modded maps installed as you and so the vast majority of multiplayer sessions will take place on the relatively low amount of maps available in-game. If you're the host, be prepared to lose every player when you switch to a more obscure map (i.e. anything on mod.io which is 90% of the content for this game).
Easy Day also removed the multiplayer object dropper long ago and have seemingly given up on re-working it, which I think is pretty incompetent considering the molasses-slow drip-feed of content updates.
I know I've done a lot of shitting on the game here but that's purely because it's set up for so much potential and falls quite short of that ceiling. Even so, at a baseline level this is undeniably one of the best sim-focused skateboarding sims on the market. We've come a long way from the days of comparing PS1 games like arcadey Tony Hawk to middle of the road Grind Session to sim-style Thrasher: Skate And Destroy. All in all, this game is as fun as you can make it with mods and user content. Just do not expect it to be excellent out of the box because it isn't and every passing year further diminishes the features that made it stand out. Vanilla Session takes the cake all day even with its lack of vert.
Maybe one day we'll get a perfect mix of Skater XL, Session and Skate, a genuine skateboarding sim that appeals to everyone. But that is not this day. Realistically if you want the best of both worlds in sim skating, you have to buy both XL and Session. Oh well, at least we have a couple of options these days.
Peace :praisesun: