Last night we downloaded an upgrade to the iPhone/iPod Touch game Vans Sk8 Pool Service (which is now only $2.99 for a limited time) and it reminded us that we still haven’t posted our review of what is probably the best skate game for the iPhone? So here it is two months late:
Our copy of Vans SK8 Pool Service arrived from Vans in a box on a brand new 8 gig Apple iPod Touch. How cool is that? We popped that thing open and began playing the game right away.
Follow the jump for a little overview of what we experienced.
Vans Sk8 Pool Service starts up with a short live action video clip of Bucky Lasek and Omar Hassan skating some pools (if you don’t want to watch it just tap the screen). From there we dropped into FreeRide mode which we hoped would help us learn the controls.
Not being video gamers the thing we hate most about using different systems is having to learn new button combos. One of the best things about Pool Service is that controlling the skateboarders requires no button pushing at all because there are no buttons. Bucky started skating the twisted clover pool without us doing anything and kept skating pretty flawlessly while we tried to figure out how to make him do stuff.
Controlling the skaters is touted as being as easy as tipping the iPod touch in the right direction. Want Bucky to roll to his right, tilt the iPod that way. Which way the skater turns however is based on which way he is going. The thing that messed us up initially is that because there are no set left and right (as there would be with buttons) the game has a little of that Wii remote softness were we sometimes had no idea what our movements were doing to the skateboarder on the screen.
After a few minutes we realized that we’re not really controlling the skater as much as we are moving the pool around him. When we stopped thinking entirely it became much more fluid.
Doing tricks is where things get a little more complicated. All tricks are accomplished with combinations of finger swipes on the iPod’s screen. Hold two fingers down and you get a 50-50 grind. Lift one finger off the screen during the grind and it turns into a boardslide or lipslide. Want to do an airwalk? Swipe left from any point on the screen: it can be your right finger on the right side, left finger on the left. It doesn’t matter as long as it is one swipe to the left. The screen highlights with a light grey swipe to show when the gesture has been recognized.
A kickflip requires swiping two fingers to the left somewhere on the screen. The rest of the tricks are combinations of swipes in one direction or the other. While we did have some trouble with the swipes registering (and twice swiped right on to the home button turning the game off in a record setting run). After a few runs it all smoothed out and we were busting out wizardry straight out of the Pro-Tech Pool Party.
After mastering freeride mode, career mode sent us on a toward 10 different events with evolving goals including pool cleaner, the grind, pro, Spin 2 win, Never enough time, best run, S.K.A.T.E, No Bails, and finally pool jam. The goals definitely made us spend more time on the game, but with no new pools to skate it wasn’t as motivating as we’d have wished.
Vans Sk8 Pool Service shows better than any game we’ve seen so far what is possible from full-motion action video gaming on the iPod touch and iPhone, but still there are few things that bugged us with the original version. Aside from a pop on take-off and a slight clack on landing the original version had were no real skateboarding sounds: no grinding sounds, no rolling sounds. Nothing. And in pool skating if there is no grinding sound there is no grind. There is also no way to do airs to fakie or land fakie at all, ever. No matter what we did, our skater would always revert on touch down, which is completely disorienting when skating around a pool.
We were so confused by both of these things that we checked with Fuel Industries’ Brian Robbins to make sure we weren’t just confused. On the sound issue he was a little surprised: “Wow! You’re the first people to mention and notice this but yes, you are correct,” he said. “We had some of these in place during development, but pulled them out for a bit, and it looks like they never got put back in. We’ll be looking into getting this resolved for the next update we do.”
Sure enough, in the newest version of the game (that we downloaded last night) all the sounds are there including rolling, spinning wheels on airs, grinding, and the clacks. It’s amazing how much better the game plays with those sounds back in the mix.
The no-revert problem that continually messed us up it apparently a feature of the game, according to Robbins. “This is something we’d love to “fix” in a future update but it just wasn’t quite looking good enough for us and everyone felt it’d be better to have the no fakie limitation at first, than a fakie that didn’t look good,” he said.
We’re not so sure we agree with him. After years of playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater there is nothing more annoying than having a character revert every time he lands an air.
If the revert issue gets fixed in a future update then we’ll be 100 percent satisfied with SK8 Pool Service. Until then, it’s still a fun game that definitely worth its $4.99 price tag ($2.99 if you buy it today). And no, Bucky, we don’t want you to lose your sponsorship.
