Airblade has some tricks up its sleeve, but doesn't quite stick the landing.
Airblade is a Tony Hawk knock off with a science fiction setting. The titular airblade is a hoverboard powered by anti-gravity, a product of clean energy research. The dystopian corporate overlords want to destroy the airblade, and the experimental anti-gravity technology along with it, so they can continue profiting off of fossil fuels.
The idea of a skateboarding game with no gravity presents some interesting ideas. No gravity means no gaining momentum from downward slopes, your default movement speed is quite slow. Generally in this kind of game you would build up speed, and then start tricking and try to maintain your speed in order to keep balance while you do your moves. Here, you do tricks in order to build and maintain a boost meter. The game does still have combos and scoring, so tricks still have most of their typical purpose intact, though the way you keep pace with the level has certainly changed. The fact that your hoverboard is never actually touching the ground but your combos and trick options are still affected by whether or not you have "big air" does obfuscate things a little. Generally you get a good sense of speed and control, though player expression is not as fully featured as in a typical skating game as "grab" tricks no longer involve grabbing the board, but instead are for grabbing objects in the environment to swing from them.
Each level presents you with some number of objectives, and while they have some kind of narrative explanation for why you're doing what you do, the mechanics are generally 1:1 with Pro Skater; grind on 3 of these, swing off 5 of those, if you run out of time it's game over. One of your partner characters will always verbally direct you to a particular set of objectives at the start, and an arrow at the top of the screen will always point towards a single target. Despite this you are able to do most objectives in whatever order you please, though not all of them will populate the map until some number have been completed. The exit won't open until you've done everything. Generally speaking I would say the core mechanics are much easier than Tony Hawk. Since the airblade is never actually touching the ground, very few tricks can be messed up badly enough to result in a wipeout, and balancing during grinds is borderline trivial.
However, the fact that you absolutely need to do everything in the level in order to progress makes a world of a difference. In Pro Skater, the "perfect run" was primarily a self-imposed challenge, here it's mandatory to progress. Many skateparks have some tedious or obtuse tasks that can be skipped over once the player has done enough to move on, not so here. Almost every level ends with some ridiculous leap of faith combo string where you have to do a specific sequence of grinds and swings in order to reach the borderline inaccessible highest point of the map. If you know what you're doing, this game's main story mode can be beaten in barely 15 minutes, but on your first playthrough your definitely will not know what you're doing.
The fifth level, the last normal one, is just flatly evil. The level takes place on several sky scraping rooftops, with an instant death bottomless pit below. Several objectives involve hopping from building to building, grinding on precarious rails to knock things down into the void. The first objective you are directed towards is to knock four cable cars off their rail; the first and last time that you do this, the game goes into slow motion and the camera angle changes, and you just have to hope and pray that you've pressed the right buttons for the right amount of time to land back on the rail when the camera repositions itself.
It's moments like that which will make you appreciate how well put together Airblade is as a piece of software. Load times are short, quicksaving is unobtrusive, and reloading a level from the pause menu is virtually instant (which is good, because in the later levels you'll probably be doing this a lot). Performance is excellent, visuals are mostly effective for the purpose of communicating aspects of gameplay; the only exception is the character models, which are all a bit dark, making it difficult to distinguish enemies from the small crowds of NPCs that often surround them.
The audiovisual aesthetic is great. After just one half-hour session with the game I had every song I heard stuck in my head all week, I feel like these songs have always been there. To be fair these aren't the most original compositions in the world, and some pretty common samples are featured, but it's solid tunes. The menus are just plain slick. Characters are about what you would expect for early 00's, which is exactly what I want to see. I love it when a businessman in a trenchcoat says he's going to "bust in cap in your ass" to someone who wouldn't look out of place in Cubix.
The most disappointing thing about the game is that we don't really see much like this anymore. Aside from being an obvious attempt to leech off the success of a much larger franchise, this is a very well thought out original concept in terms of how the mechanics and narrative fit together and how it differentiates itself from its competitors. But franchises are where the money is at so all that Criterion can do now is either their signature style of racing or development support on whatever EA's next microtransaction machine is going to be.
Airblade is a Tony Hawk knock off with a science fiction setting. The titular airblade is a hoverboard powered by anti-gravity, a product of clean energy research. The dystopian corporate overlords want to destroy the airblade, and the experimental anti-gravity technology along with it, so they can continue profiting off of fossil fuels.
The idea of a skateboarding game with no gravity presents some interesting ideas. No gravity means no gaining momentum from downward slopes, your default movement speed is quite slow. Generally in this kind of game you would build up speed, and then start tricking and try to maintain your speed in order to keep balance while you do your moves. Here, you do tricks in order to build and maintain a boost meter. The game does still have combos and scoring, so tricks still have most of their typical purpose intact, though the way you keep pace with the level has certainly changed. The fact that your hoverboard is never actually touching the ground but your combos and trick options are still affected by whether or not you have "big air" does obfuscate things a little. Generally you get a good sense of speed and control, though player expression is not as fully featured as in a typical skating game as "grab" tricks no longer involve grabbing the board, but instead are for grabbing objects in the environment to swing from them.
Each level presents you with some number of objectives, and while they have some kind of narrative explanation for why you're doing what you do, the mechanics are generally 1:1 with Pro Skater; grind on 3 of these, swing off 5 of those, if you run out of time it's game over. One of your partner characters will always verbally direct you to a particular set of objectives at the start, and an arrow at the top of the screen will always point towards a single target. Despite this you are able to do most objectives in whatever order you please, though not all of them will populate the map until some number have been completed. The exit won't open until you've done everything. Generally speaking I would say the core mechanics are much easier than Tony Hawk. Since the airblade is never actually touching the ground, very few tricks can be messed up badly enough to result in a wipeout, and balancing during grinds is borderline trivial.
However, the fact that you absolutely need to do everything in the level in order to progress makes a world of a difference. In Pro Skater, the "perfect run" was primarily a self-imposed challenge, here it's mandatory to progress. Many skateparks have some tedious or obtuse tasks that can be skipped over once the player has done enough to move on, not so here. Almost every level ends with some ridiculous leap of faith combo string where you have to do a specific sequence of grinds and swings in order to reach the borderline inaccessible highest point of the map. If you know what you're doing, this game's main story mode can be beaten in barely 15 minutes, but on your first playthrough your definitely will not know what you're doing.
The fifth level, the last normal one, is just flatly evil. The level takes place on several sky scraping rooftops, with an instant death bottomless pit below. Several objectives involve hopping from building to building, grinding on precarious rails to knock things down into the void. The first objective you are directed towards is to knock four cable cars off their rail; the first and last time that you do this, the game goes into slow motion and the camera angle changes, and you just have to hope and pray that you've pressed the right buttons for the right amount of time to land back on the rail when the camera repositions itself.
It's moments like that which will make you appreciate how well put together Airblade is as a piece of software. Load times are short, quicksaving is unobtrusive, and reloading a level from the pause menu is virtually instant (which is good, because in the later levels you'll probably be doing this a lot). Performance is excellent, visuals are mostly effective for the purpose of communicating aspects of gameplay; the only exception is the character models, which are all a bit dark, making it difficult to distinguish enemies from the small crowds of NPCs that often surround them.
The audiovisual aesthetic is great. After just one half-hour session with the game I had every song I heard stuck in my head all week, I feel like these songs have always been there. To be fair these aren't the most original compositions in the world, and some pretty common samples are featured, but it's solid tunes. The menus are just plain slick. Characters are about what you would expect for early 00's, which is exactly what I want to see. I love it when a businessman in a trenchcoat says he's going to "bust in cap in your ass" to someone who wouldn't look out of place in Cubix.
The most disappointing thing about the game is that we don't really see much like this anymore. Aside from being an obvious attempt to leech off the success of a much larger franchise, this is a very well thought out original concept in terms of how the mechanics and narrative fit together and how it differentiates itself from its competitors. But franchises are where the money is at so all that Criterion can do now is either their signature style of racing or development support on whatever EA's next microtransaction machine is going to be.