Free Running doesn't commit to the jump.
Despite its continued prevalence in the 00's, the growth of "skater culture" in the popular consciousness was more of a 90's phenomenon; the 00's were all about parkour. Parkour-style maneuvers continue to be a feature in a wide variety of video games today. Parkour is virtually never the actual focus of these games, just one mechanic in a game with many others, always with a more fantastical setting and stakes than athleticism itself. Somewhere in the middle, during the extreme sports game boom, there surely should have been a game focused squarely on parkour.
Free Running, from the studio best known for Sniper Elite, is the only game of this type that I could find. It appears to have initially released only in Europe and Australia, not making to the US until it was ported to the Wii in 2010, and was eventually released on Steam in 2019. In 2007 the game was already a little late, a PS2 game in a post-PS3 world, coming out the same year that Assassin's Creed would basically declare parkour itself insufficient to carry a game on its own. Compare the box art of the PS2 and PSP versions to the new art that has been used since the Wii (the box art used on this page). Not only does this mark the general cultural shift, in only a few short years the public idea of parkour changing, but also it's another example of what I talked about in my review of The Sky Crawlers; trying to find hidden gems in the Wii library is basically impossible because even "core" titles try to blend in with party and fitness games.
Not that Free Running is a hidden gem by any means, frankly it's pretty rough. The game sort of takes on the control scheme, structure, and format of the post-Tony Hawk extreme sports games that came before it, but does so completely without grace or style. The simple function of each button is up for debate: X is a sort of "balance" button, A is a sort of "grab" button, Y is usually jump, and the shoulders are for special moves, but beyond this you may as well be memorizing random patterns. The difficulty in platforming doesn't come from actually performing any maneuver, it comes from managing the impact, but how you do this is completely inconsistent. Some actions (grabbing poles, for example) will happen completely automatically, others will happen automatically but penalize you for not timing a button press, and others won't happen at all without that button press. Sometimes you need to press the X button (such as recovering from a fall), sometimes you need to press the A button (such as when grabbing ledges) but there is no intuitive rhyme or reason to most of the expected inputs.
The sort of atemporal product design of the Wii release's packaging betrays the actual aesthetic of the game, in retrospect it paints a surprisingly bleak picture, intentionally or otherwise. The very implication of the term "free" running, as opposed to some other kind, should make one consider what kinds of shifts had to occur in our society for the space once occupied by skateboarding, usually characterized as a form of both self-expression and rebellion, is now taken up by normal human movement. Pro Skater has the player begin in abandoned warehouses, schools, malls. Outside of the tutorial gymnasium, the first level of Free Running is a city rooftop. The freeway is visible in the skybox, traffic is at a standstill, blocked by police cars. The name of the level is simply "home".
Despite its continued prevalence in the 00's, the growth of "skater culture" in the popular consciousness was more of a 90's phenomenon; the 00's were all about parkour. Parkour-style maneuvers continue to be a feature in a wide variety of video games today. Parkour is virtually never the actual focus of these games, just one mechanic in a game with many others, always with a more fantastical setting and stakes than athleticism itself. Somewhere in the middle, during the extreme sports game boom, there surely should have been a game focused squarely on parkour.
Free Running, from the studio best known for Sniper Elite, is the only game of this type that I could find. It appears to have initially released only in Europe and Australia, not making to the US until it was ported to the Wii in 2010, and was eventually released on Steam in 2019. In 2007 the game was already a little late, a PS2 game in a post-PS3 world, coming out the same year that Assassin's Creed would basically declare parkour itself insufficient to carry a game on its own. Compare the box art of the PS2 and PSP versions to the new art that has been used since the Wii (the box art used on this page). Not only does this mark the general cultural shift, in only a few short years the public idea of parkour changing, but also it's another example of what I talked about in my review of The Sky Crawlers; trying to find hidden gems in the Wii library is basically impossible because even "core" titles try to blend in with party and fitness games.
Not that Free Running is a hidden gem by any means, frankly it's pretty rough. The game sort of takes on the control scheme, structure, and format of the post-Tony Hawk extreme sports games that came before it, but does so completely without grace or style. The simple function of each button is up for debate: X is a sort of "balance" button, A is a sort of "grab" button, Y is usually jump, and the shoulders are for special moves, but beyond this you may as well be memorizing random patterns. The difficulty in platforming doesn't come from actually performing any maneuver, it comes from managing the impact, but how you do this is completely inconsistent. Some actions (grabbing poles, for example) will happen completely automatically, others will happen automatically but penalize you for not timing a button press, and others won't happen at all without that button press. Sometimes you need to press the X button (such as recovering from a fall), sometimes you need to press the A button (such as when grabbing ledges) but there is no intuitive rhyme or reason to most of the expected inputs.
The sort of atemporal product design of the Wii release's packaging betrays the actual aesthetic of the game, in retrospect it paints a surprisingly bleak picture, intentionally or otherwise. The very implication of the term "free" running, as opposed to some other kind, should make one consider what kinds of shifts had to occur in our society for the space once occupied by skateboarding, usually characterized as a form of both self-expression and rebellion, is now taken up by normal human movement. Pro Skater has the player begin in abandoned warehouses, schools, malls. Outside of the tutorial gymnasium, the first level of Free Running is a city rooftop. The freeway is visible in the skybox, traffic is at a standstill, blocked by police cars. The name of the level is simply "home".