SkateBIRD
Glass Bottom Games
Nintendo Switch
SkateBIRD is a bad skateboarding game. I know it’s not good to start off on a negative note but this game does not work. The inspiration for this game came from a GIF of a bird riding a skateboard.
Only thing to do is go over the experience from downloading it from the Nintendo eShop to just giving up on the first level.
Experience
After the game downloaded, the first introduction is a mess. Bird character customization is significantly broken. You can’t rotate the bird to see how an item or board design looks like. It’s just a static straight forward perspective with no way to see the full creation. After creating your bird, you start the game.
The point of the game is to skate around your owner’s bedroom completing missions to help them get motivated to start skating again. To get missions you need to talk to other birds. The other birds are in different locations that are impossible to find. With no directions or help markers to find them and move you along to the next one. After a mission you can be stuck trying to navigate the room and give up from either lack of direction or just how horrible of an experience the mechanics truly are.
Game play is a patchwork of broken physics and logic. You can land sideways on the bed with no issue but get knocked off your board if you go up the pizza boxes too fast. This constant guess work of what knocks you off the board makes steering around a massive challenge to not randomly fall off by being too close to something. With the horrible camera angle controls you would think the point of the game is staying on the board.
The only tricks that work consistently are kick tricks. Consequently, everything else is broken or flawed making the player go through torture to try and pull off a combo that isn’t a bunch of kick trick. Grabs, grinds, transfers are patchy and either doesn’t work or you start doing them just to fall off the board.
Final Thoughts
SkateBIRD is not a good game. From the bird character customization to the actual game it self. It pains me to be this negative as this is someone’s passion and livelihood but to say it was anything but bad would be lying about the issues with this game.
The only positive of the game is the music selection. It fits the themes and vibe of traditional skating games and tries to distract you from how horrible the game is. With them being a bird theme was a cute addition as well.
I grew up skating because of games like Tony Hawk and Skate and the cultural influence they had on the sport. This game lands like bird poop on a clean car. SkateBIRD is full of frustration and disappointment. With skateboarding games slowly making a comeback games like SkateBIRD will be popping up taking advantage of that resurgence.