SkateBIRD (Xbox One)
Take a small round bird, put it on a board with four wheels, and you have yourself the adorably silly indie game SkateBIRD. While the concept of a tiny bird skateboarding around is amusing as a concept, to take things beyond a funny and cute visual is another task entirely. SkateBIRD struggles once it’s asked to be more than just an entertaining proposal for a game though, and even though it copies many of the skateboard tricks and even controls of the popular Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series to help makes its idea come to life, it doesn’t have the same degree of technical polish needed to pull it off.
SkateBIRD first lets you create a custom bird to ride on your board, and the available species offered are surprisingly diverse. You can be a kookaburra, budgie, cardinal, finch, hawk, jay, and more with even many small variations within a family, although the need to make them all adhere to a fairly similar round body type for the skateboarding can mean something like a barn owl doesn’t quite look like it’s real life counterpart. The birds can also wear costumes while out boarding and again, there are quite a few options available and even more can be picked up inside levels since you can change your bird’s appearance any time. Unfortunately pretty much anything you wear on your bird’s back will clip through its body even while at rest, but things like hats and accessories often better fit the broad range of bird body types. Once your bird, known in-game as Birb, is ready to go, you’ll find yourself starting in the bedroom of what appears to be quite the bird enthusiast. For the most part, the unseen human who owns the place lets the birds roam the room as they please, and as such the small creatures are quite fond of their Big Friend and worried when they seem to be overworked and rarely able to return home. In response, the birds orchestrate a plan to aid their owner, not just by tidying up around the house but soon breaking into the office and trying to enact some pretty radical changes for a group of birds that often barely understand what they’re doing.
The game can definitely make you fawn over the the many adorable little avians you encounter on your adventure that inexplicably includes skateboarding as its main means of assisting the Big Friend. A few recurring bird friends become welcome faces and their comedic personalities can sometimes elicit some earned laughs, although the writing can sometimes lean hard into overemphasizing statements so that the absurdity of treating something silly like a dramatic moment loses its effect. However, the unusual behaviors of the birds do make for a somewhat endearing adventure where it’s fun to see what relevant activity a familiar bird is engaged in when you reach a new level.
SkateBIRD leaning on its look and concept bleeds into the level design as well, with all the skate parks in this stage actually normal areas the tiny birds have constructed ramps and other skate-friendly surfaces out of cardboard or bent magazines. With your tiny bird able to fit in a person’s palm, a bedroom or office can feel comparatively gigantic and it is interesting to first enter a stage and see how it is designed. However, while it can shine in creativity with areas like the computer interior, it also has some fairly bland stages like the rooftops and admittedly the bedroom you visit more than once isn’t really the best skate area. SkateBIRD has a lot of trouble setting up interesting skate lines to head down while stringing together tricks, meaning it’s often best to find a fairly safe set of ramps to go back and forth with. Grinds will throw you out into areas with no potential or even transferring from one area to another will be a laborious process of taking an exact path slowly. Bonus points can be rewarded for the game’s score missions for leaping over certain gaps, but the prize for doing such an action is often minimal compared to just finding a tiny area and repeating the same set of tricks.
The trick system in SkateBIRD is flawed and unsatisfying to boot. Oftentimes it can be hard to even make out what your bird’s trick is meant to be, their inability to use their wings to grip the board limiting their animation options. SkateBIRD has a surprising amount of missions that don’t entail earning points with a sequence of linked together tricks, but when it is time to do one, what is perhaps the most mechanically layered part of the experience still has its problems. A combo timer activates after your first trick and as long as you keep performing fresh moves without falling off the board you can keep refreshing that timer. Unlike in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, after landing from a jump, you can skate forward while not doing a trick and still be within the combo, giving you the opportunity to set up another jump towards a rail to grind or a ramp to get air off of. Flip tricks and grab tricks in the air can be performed fairly easily even with a short hop, but the main means of earning high scores will be making a long combo and then holding a specific trick for a period of time. Be it a grab while in the air, a grind on a rail, a board stall where you perch in place on an edge, or something like a manual where you tip your board while riding across the ground, maintaining these will earn you the high point values needed to meet some of the later game quotas. Balance meters exist to make stalling, grinding, and doing manuals a bit more difficult, but there are a few bird-specific tricks thrown in as well. The scream is a quick way to keep a combo going if you can’t find much else to do in a moment, and the munch lets your bird lean down to bite their board while riding it for an easy quick ground trick that’s not hard to maintain. That munch move is also prone to abuse though, as you can sometimes just hammer the B button and munch your board twenty or so times in quick succession without worry, getting your multiplier very high for minimal work to make earning points easier.
The last bird trick you have is a second jump done by flapping your wings, and while the munch maneuver simplifies your trick options once you realize its exploitable nature, the double jump instead rubs up against the side of the game that may make you willing to abuse the munch trick to avoid the issues elsewhere. Double jumps are not reliable, and neither are many other elements of the game’s physics. What can sometimes look like an easy rail to grind on with a good jump instead becomes a gamble as your jump, even with a well-timed flap, can feel inconsistent on how much height it can get. Part of this ties to the Fancy meter where you are meant to gain energy for bigger jumps by going up ramps, but the detection for ascending ramps is sometimes odd and building that Fancy meter to its max can still lead to your jump not being as reliable as it should be. Considering how often a jump is needed to pull off a grind or traverse levels that are already a bit too focused on making linear paths rather than lines to skate along the way to an area, having such an inconsistency in a core maneuver will sometimes lead to a sudden wipe out that not only ends a combo without registering your points, but wipes out your fancy meter as well. Therefore you are incentivized even more to avoid the gambles and stick to boring safe zones where you can string together the same tricks and vary it ever so slightly to prevent the game no longer providing timer bonuses if you repeat the same maneuvers too often in a row. There are more issues with the movement as well, attempting a double jump while taking off a vertical ramp will sometimes level out your bird and shove them an unusual amount of distance backwards. Sometimes even without a ramp you might find yourself starting to treat a normal wall as a skateable surface. Hitting a wall head on sometimes bounces you off, sometimes wipes you out, and sometimes leaves your bird shuffling in place as the game can’t decide which of the two it wants to do.
Add in some issues with a bad turning radius that makes moving around even less fluid than you’d hope and SkateBIRD ends up on shaky ground, but some of this is balanced out by the game not expecting much out of you. Missions in the story often just involve grabbing a bunch of floating collectibles or hitting a specific area with a trick, although some are about getting to a certain spot that would be less of a challenge if everything controlled smoothly. Still, the objectives start off expecting very little of you, and for a game with the occasional technical problem that might lead to your bird falling off its board, the developers quite wisely threw in a near instant option to be back on it and back in the action. By keeping many of its goal designs not all that demanding and making recovery from a bail so swift and easy, it is easier to roll with the punches and push on despite a moment where the game’s controls rubbed you the wrong way. Even nicer is the option to set a reset point anywhere in a level you can return to with a press of a button, an option not available in missions but it is a way to avoid some of the long empty climbs expected in areas like the office to get to mission-giving birds. In fact, this forgiving design can make it fairly easy to adjust to the game’s problems by avoiding moments where they arise and easily brushing it off if they do crop up, so at times SkateBIRD might not even ruffle a player’s feathers with its flaws because it so quickly lets you push past them. However, the shallowness of collection missions and the problems with moments where you do need to control Birb properly but struggle against the rough physics do make it hard to still really get into the gameplay of SkateBIRD.
THE VERDICT: Cuteness and comedy with a layer of forgiving design attempt to shield SkateBIRD from the wear and tear of its poorly designed skateboarding gameplay but they can’t quite overcome the persistent niggling problems. Mechanical issues arise through actual glitches like how it determines if you can ride a surface while others like the jumping are instead inconsistent even when working properly. Levels aren’t particularly conducive to creative or involved trick combos despite their sometimes intriguing visual design, and many of the goals instead are simple collection missions since they’re less likely to buckle under the problems with your movement. Quick respawns do patch over some frustrations since you can hop right back in, but it feels like SkateBIRD is trying to hold your interest more with humor than with interesting activities.
And so, I give SkateBIRD for Xbox One…
A BAD rating. SkateBIRD’s poor design can feel harmless at times when you’re so quickly back on your board you barely register the wipe out or you’re engaging with some simple and silly mission that doesn’t even ask much of you, but besides interacting with some interesting bird personalities, there’s not really much in what you’re doing to keep you entertained. You can get the small satisfaction of quickly completing missions, but they’re not fulfilling because grabbing a bunch of floating snacks or doing a basic trick next to some rockets to ignite them doesn’t really challenge you unless a movement mechanic is going awry. The biggest difficulty barrier will often be the level design and your unwieldy bird disagreeing, setting up clean jumps or getting to an important area sometimes taking more effort than they reasonably should. You’re not being tested for your skill at these moments, you’re wrangling a roughly designed control system. Those issues make the moments where you are asked to engage with the trick system that has some depth boil down into something that will need to lean into raw effective mundane tactics rather than any challenging skate lines or battles with waning balance meters, especially since some balance meters will refresh once you’ve put enough space between when you last pulled of that trick type. Even more confusing is that messing up with the balance meter is not a guaranteed end of trick, your bird often tumbling in a way that can cause them to bail but maybe they’ll land just fine and keep going. It’s a bit of mercy that such a thing can happen, but the rough edges are all too apparent most of the experience, and since the game doesn’t control cleanly, it can’t start to ask for the player to do anything too advanced or interesting even if its accommodations can offset the sting of failure.
SkateBIRD is still somewhat endearing though. While I have been hard on its mechanical failings, speedy recovery keeps them from being the main memories left behind by this absurd bird skateboarding game. SkateBIRD can end up a game you know is bad and has issues but its strange charm still comes through well enough. It’s got a soundtrack with some fun tracks, it tells a few good jokes, and the birds are indeed adorable little balls of fluff, so in the end a lot of the conceptual side does do its job of amusing the player, it just doesn’t really work as an interactive idea because the birds cannot actually skate all that well.