How do you shape a city when you’re competing with seven others? We find out.
Shaun White Skateboarding is all about building momentum and using it to restore color to a lifeless city. At the heart of the game is the flow system, which tracks how stylish your skateboarding moves are at any given moment, and rewards you with new abilities. The most striking of those rewards is the ability to create new skating opportunities entirely on the fly, like creating ramps from thin air and extending handrails well past the point at which the stairs end. We’ve previously covered how Ubisoft is putting those traits to work in the game’s single-player mode, so now let’s talk a little bit about how multiplayer works.
There are four modes in Shaun White Skateboarding multiplayer, and they all use those flow and coloring/creation mechanics to some extent. First, there’s Ministry vs. Rising. This mode is a team-based battle between rebel skaters trying to restore life to the city and the ministry–that authoritarian government who’s responsible for making everything so bleak. What’s cool about this mode is that it takes that whole coloring system from the single-player and throws it in a blender. The two teams are constantly fighting over points on the map to influence the atmosphere of the city, going from bright and colorful to dull and blue at any given moment. Think of it as a visual tug of war where, instead of rope, you’ve got four wheels and a bunch of ramps.
The next mode is Go With the Flow. This mode is more of a straightforward points battle. It can be played either free for all or with teams. While you can focus on creating new obstacles, it doesn’t really matter how you score points, so you’re free to explore the world around you and search out some of the cool obstacles already there. At one point in a map called Rising Park, we stumbled upon a semi-closed tunnel that let us pull repeated loop-de-loops before our momentum sent us rocketing out the side in a limb-flailing display of hilarious agony.
Another mode is Free Skate, which is pretty self-explanatory. You just get a bunch of players together–as many as eight–and hang out with no goals or competition. You just skate around and have fun. Then, lastly, there’s Shaping Battle. This is a mode where you’re all trying to get to a certain threshold on your flow meter to start creating obstacles on the fly, and the winner is the person who has shaped the most obstacles. This mode was our least favorite because there’s a limitation that knocks back your flow once another player starts shaping obstacles–which struck us as the skating game equivalent of a frustrating knock-back attack during a boss battle.
In every mode you play, you can find power-ups that help you and hurt your opponents in various ways. There’s one that temporarily gives you perfect balance, one that lets you aim at opponents to knock them down, and a few others. These power-ups give the multiplayer a sort of Mario Kart feel to it and help differentiate the experience from a realistic skating sim like EA’s Skate franchise.
After spending some hands-on time with the game’s multiplayer, we’re left with some differing thoughts. It’s clear that Shaun White Skateboarding multiplayer makes use of the game’s unique single-player mechanics in some entertaining ways (Ministry vs. Rising, most notably), while Shaping Battle felt like a real missed opportunity. But there’s only so much you can judge about a game from one look at a few of its features, so be sure to keep an eye out for our review when the game arrives on October 24.
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