SkateBIRD is a Tony Hawk-style skateboarding game featuring birds (including a Tiny Hawk). For a fun premise like that, a game doesn’t have to be astounding to be enjoyable, it just needs to have decent gameplay (even if it’s mostly copied from another game) and some fun levels, missions and dialogue. That’s what I was hoping for from skateBIRD, nothing mind blowing, but a cheesy, fun experience. Sadly, I ended up very disappointed.

Starting up skateBIRD, you’ll get to customise your bird, choosing from many different types of bird (all control exactly the same), hats and various other accessories. You can’t rotate the bird, so you won’t know what some of the back accessories look like until you start playing. There’s a lot of fun things to choose from, with more to find hidden in levels.

You’ll skate through five different levels: a studio apartment, the top of a building, an office, a server and a different studio apartment. The majority of the game is just grey and brown, and there’s very little in the way of background detail to look at. It’s all very drab. To make matters worse, there’s some kind of effect (depth of field perhaps) that makes things not directly next to your bird look like a blur, so most of the time the only things you can see clearly are the bird and floor. The texture of the floor itself (and other scenery) is fairly low quality, while ramps made out of magazines (and the cat photo) are extremely well detailed, creating a mitchmatch of things that just don’t fit.

The levels themselves have very little structure to them, different areas don’t flow into each other very well and you won’t find yourself chaining combos between different sections of the level, instead focusing on just getting a score in one small section. The missions also rarely use the levels well. In Tony Hawk games, sections of levels seem specifically designed for missions, while in this it seems they just came up with random ideas for missions and just worked them into somewhere in the level. Missions will involve getting a high score, doing specific tricks or collecting objects.

There’s a “arrow” in the shape of a bird at the bottom of the screen that tries to lead you towards objectives, but doesn’t take into account that thing can be on a higher section of the level, meaning you have to take a long route to try a different height. The dull colour scheme also means that items don’t stand out, and there’s no highlight or “glow” on them. There’s one in particular where you find paperclips and they’re difficult to see even looking directly at them (the image below actually contains most of the paperclips). The cutscenes are (apart from two or three instances) focused entirely on the birds, so won’t show a rough overview of where you need to go.

I haven’t even touched on the core gameplay yet. Take one of the older Tony Hawk games (before they added things like tricks while grinding) and this aims to function in the same way. Sadly, everything feels floaty – not “better air due to bird” floaty, but in a slow and delayed way. There are a lot of corners, nooks and crannies that your bird will get stuck on, grinding only works when it feels like it.

One big difference between the gameplay of Tony Hawk and skateBIRD is the “FANCY” meter. As you perform tricks, it will fill up. This isn’t a combo meter (although that also exists), but determines your speed and how high you can jump. Crashing or bumping into something will reset it completely, although sometimes the game likes to reset it on its own. Filling it up also feels very inconsistent, sometimes a small amount of tricks on the ground is enough, sometimes doing 5 kickflips and a spin off a ramp won’t add anything. As having a high FANCY metre is necessary, the issues with it, and the control issues that can cause it to empty, lead to a lot of frustrations, and will require you to reset the missions a lot. It’s a really horrible game mechanic that isn’t fun in any way.

Restarting missions a lot also comes with other annoyances. The music in skateBIRD is surprisingly good, starting off with some odd but entertaining tracks where people give bird facts in tune to music (it feels a bit Jet Set Radio), with a bunch of rock songs you can unlock throughout the game. Starting a mission, restarting a mission and ending a mission will make the game skip to another track, you’ll unfortunately mainly hear the start of each song a lot. The starting cutscene for each mission will play every time, and you’ll have to tap A repeatedly to skip. There’s also another really odd thing about the start of missions: the place you start at (and respawn if you have to reset when you get stuck) seems to be the position your bird is in for the cutscene. This means that for a lot of missions, you start off facing away from where you need to go, sometimes facing a wall or a few times just aimed right at a drop (which means if you mash A to skip the dialogue for slightly too long, you’ll jump down when it starts and have to restart again).

The dialogue is mildly amusing. I didn’t encounter anything hilarious, but it would be entertaining enough if the gameplay was fun. One really nice feature is that you can “birbify” the words with a slider. The more “birb”, the more it sounds like a kid being silly with purposefully misspelt words and bad grammar.

For skateBIRD to be an enjoyable experience, all it needed to be was a semi-decent Tony Hawk clone. Sadly, the gameplay itself is incredibly frustrating, inconsistent and, frankly, a complete mess. It’s something you would expect from an Early Access title, not the final release.

I’ve seen such harsh criticism of this game and I don’t really get it. It’s a good arcadey skateboard game in the vein of tony hawk with some quirks. Flight as a mechanic to add additional tricks and the like. It gives a variety of challenges that are like what you’d find in THPS but also others like just rolling around after bailing and reaching target zones.

They don’t always work perfectly, and the difficulty is uneven but I really didn’t have any problems with the controls or camera. I thought it was very cute, and had a lot of charm in the levels and story, and the costume options. Even the writing despite being born from “birb” memes that got tired was pretty good and would pull a chuckle from me.

The soundtrack is also great, approximating the sort of ost in a THPS but with small artists. We Are The Union rocks and I’ve begun following them

The first level of this game is honestly fantastic. If you can get the game on sale for dirt cheap on whatever you majorly play your games on, I absolutely recommend it if you're a fan of the Pro Skater games. A bedroom transformed into a skate park for a bird on a teck deck is complete genius and I had so much fun.

Then the game goes into stage 2 and this is where I had to stop because wow does this game get WAY TOO hard to even keep going, not to mention, just loses a lot of charm because now we're just on a connection of buildings.

It's hard to even decide if Skatebird is a solid title or not, but since I had so much fun in the first stage I can't hate it

A mechanically sloppy skateboarding game that fortunately has other nice things to enjoy about it. The mostly chill and funk-ish base soundtrack is delightful, and the more skateboard culture adjacent ska-punk rock collectible tracks are quite solid. There's a fun cartoon-y story about a group of birds trying to help their owner from losing their job, it has that trademark Xalavier Nelson oddball silly tone. And the cute gimmick of playing as a little birb and being able to customize them with silly clothing is a big endearing factor. As long as you're not expecting this to be a serious skateboarding game that will test your mechanical skills, it will be a pretty decent time.

THE GOOD
- Birds are cute and the character designer is extensive.
- The music is pretty good (if you like ska)
- Anthony Hawk won my heart.

THE BAD
- The skating can feel really, really bad and you might fall off your board without knowing why.
- If you dislike ska, just turn off the music.
- Levels and missions can be frustrating as hell.

The vibes are immaculate but the skating is challenging to say the least.

I saw the trailer for the game when it first was announced and was super hyped about it. Tony Hawk birds sounds great.

I started the game on gamepass and quit almost immediately. The skating is not intuitive or easy to control.

A year later, I got Skatebird in a humble bundle and decided to give it another shot. I turned all of the difficulty settings to as low as they would go. It was a way better experience. The skating did get better as I played but the seemingly random bailing when you hit a surface slightly off-kilter still feels bad.

The character designer is great and the birbs have huge personalities. If you aren't into borderline twee birds talking about their problems, then this game isn't for you.

Bird's whole dumpy got thrown out the roof because of the weirdest collision known to man

you know I had to give my birb ice cold drip tho. Beanie, tie and eyepatch all that junk with no synergy but I just think it looks neat

Oh yeah, last thing (important!!!), go to the options page 2 and disable timer and balancing if you suck wiener like me

Skate Bird is such a novelty of an idea that it honestly felt like it couldn't fail. Birds are cute, skateboarding is hecking fun, the soundtrack is reminiscent to some '90s bands that you'd likely hear in a Tony Hawk game. Sadly tho, this game is no Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and perhaps because of such point comparison; Skate Bird simply doesn't live through it's gimmicks to give us a fun quirky bird skating game.

The biggest problem with this game is the controls, and one that perhaps is the thing that holds it back more than anything else. With Tony Hawk's Proskater, the ability to do tricks, gain momentum, and figure out how to get from point A to B felt nuanced, and something to master. With Skate Bird, getting from point A to B feels wonky like a rollercoaster that is out of control, while handling like a shopping cart that is slightly wobbly. Basically the game takes a lot of getting used to, and with the campaign lasting roughly 7-10 hrs pending on how much you do, and if you know where you're going can be extremely off putting when you are 2 hrs. deep and still are just hoping you stay on the board when you move 2 feet to the left. Combine these rough controls to move around with a somewhat half baked point scoring system, and it really leaves a lot to be desired. Ya, it has a lot of the same tricks you would see in a skating game, and yes, you can indeed get more air time, but this often leds to problems with the way maps are designed.

Not a lot of maps in Skate Bird, but perhaps the most infuriating thing about them is more so the quality of some of them. A lot of levels just do not have the same space you need to pull off tricks or gain momentum. They are either too cramped or too spacious to really make use of them as skate parks. While there is a fun novelty of each level effectively being made of various "household items", these same items don't make for a fun skating level. There is a bunch of random bumps everywhere, areas that are too far spread apart to really connect tricks throughout the level, and sometimes even too small to really make use of your additional jump that helps separate this game from other Skating games. So you add in all these factors together with controls that are hard to get used to, and a rather long yet short campaign means that a lot of people just don't finish your game out of frustration.

Charming is really the only word I can give this game tho. In the end of the day, I can say I did have fun with Skate Bird, but next to none of it was from gameplay. The funny way the birds talk, the cute outfits you can wear, and the aesthetic it has going for it all make up for a really charming game, but next to nothing as something fun when it just takes too long to feel decent at it.