It’s been a while since I last wrote something extensive about a skateboarding video game. To be honest, we had a good run of new games coming out between SkaterXL, Session, OlliOlli World, THPS 1+2, and even a small handful of smaller titles from independent studios. I was thinking all had gone quiet, as we awaited the release of the new Skate game from EA… But then Riders Republic entered the fray.
For anyone who doesn’t know – Riders Republic is… kinda weird. It’s the sequel to a game called Steep, which in itself was primarily a snowboarding game. Steep offered other activities alongside snowboarding though, each with their own deep, rich career paths. Riders Republic would expand this further, with the addition of a wealth of bike related sports.
Launching with snowboarding, skiing, wingsuits, mountain biking, and a few other sports, Riders Republic soon turned its attention to skateparks with the inclusion of BMX riding. This is what got me interested in the game, and whilst the controls were somewhat funky and sort of limited, it was fun. With the sort of terrain on offer for BMX and the enhanced trick selection on offer (e.g. grinds on bikes were not possible before the BMX update), it seemed like it was only a matter of time before skateboarding would enter the fray.
And so, here we are. After an announcement a couple of months ago, Ubisoft’s gigantic extreme sports playground now has skateboarding. Coming in as the first part of “Year 2” for the game’s live service, the skateboarding update is being hailed as an almost “Version 2.0” of Riders Republic. So how does this game’s depiction of skateboarding hold up?
Money Talks
So, the first thing I have to say about Riders Republic’s skateboarding update is that it’s sort of confusing to actually get to the skate content. As with everything in the game, skateboarding sort of bolts onto the existing system. If you started the game half a year ago (like I did) and have just come back, there isn’t anything immediately obvious to really point you toward this new stuff, past an exciting video of some Skateboarding.
I found the new skateboarding hub via the map… Fast travelled there… And then I was sort of confused about what to do next. I went to switch sports to the skateboard, and found I had to buy the new content. There is an option to try for free… however, I couldn’t find this, and I’ve spotted people putting together guides to explain how to do this. If people need to literally make a YouTube video to explain how a free trial works, then it’s probably not very well surfaced.
Anyway, as far as paying goes, fair enough. They have said this stuff is extensive, and expansive. This is basically Ubisoft’s answer to Skate right? That deserves a drop of the coin. But then, I went to actually buy the content, and discovered that in order to get it I needed to shell out further £30. So, for those keeping track: Riders Republic is a full price game (although you can get it on discount now), and after purchasing the game to play the skateboarding content, you will have to pay essentially the cost of another game to get that specific content.
I certainly don’t want to offend any other developers out there who are just trying to implement stuff they have been instructed to by management. These companies want a steady stream of income post launch to keep these games alive. I have no problem dropping some money for an update I am looking forward to. But this needs to be within reason, and Riders Republic is full of microtransactions that just feel odd embedded into a full price game – paying this much for what is (spoiler alert) an unsatifying skateboarding game that’s bolted onto a snowboarding game just rubs me the wrong way.
Already, this feels like poor onboarding compared to the competition. I’m in a bad mood and I haven’t even ridden a virtual skateboard yet. To make matters worse, because of perhaps some arbitrary time barrier I could not actually obtain the skateboarding gear to ride a skateboard at first. Despite the update going live on September 27th, it turned out I was 30 minutes too early – and the messaging around this was super hard to figure out, leaving me frustrated, annoyed and considering just closing down Riders Republic and playing Session instead.
Who Needs Who?
UX (User Experience) is really hard. I am aware of this. I do this for my job every day. And Ubisoft especially are often really good at it. So I’m kinda confused why this whole flow is as convoluted and weird as it is, and why they didn’t make the extra push to tighten this whole flow up. I suspect it’s just how they have done it for the other new sports they added during Year 1, and it worked for all of them. But here’s the catch: skateboarding isn’t like these other sports, and it doesn’t need Riders Republic.
All the other sports in this game (snowboarding, freestyle skiing, BMX, Mountain Biking, etc) are criminally under-represented in video games in 2023. I actually can’t think of many other franchises tackling these specific sports. Snowboarding has the phenomenal Shredders, which is for snowboarders what Session is for skateboarders. Mountain Biking has games like Descenders, and BMX has BMX: The Game. Each of these sports has their one other simulation game, all made by small, independent teams, who do not have the budget, connections or team size to match what a behemoth like Ubisoft is capable of.
In that regard, Ubisoft has a captive audience. If you aren’t a purist looking for simulation realism, and want an easy, pick up and play alternative, then Riders Republic is your only shot. This isn’t like the old school golden age of extreme sports, when you had the likes of SSX, 1080 Snowboarding & Amped competing for the attention of snowboarders. Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX, and Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX are both dead franchises. Riders Republic has become the de facto home for casual audiences looking for these sports.
This is not the case for skateboarding games. As mentioned at the top, we are living in a new golden era of skateboarding games. Some would say… They are back. The last THPS game, a game that is as casual, easy to learn and accessible as they come, was the highest selling game of the whole franchise. Skateboarders don’t just have one simulation game… We have three. Skateboarding is breaking out into areas that the other sports quite simply haven’t, and likely won’t, venture to. OlliOlli World’s Cartoon Network inspired take, Skate Story’s ethereal street surfing loneliness, SkateBird’s absolutely ludicrous parody. And this isn’t even mentioning Skate3, a game many are still playing to this day, 13 years after release, from a franchise that is imminently returning to the spotlight. Skateboarders are no longer starved of titles to play.
So, with this in mind: Why would Riders Republic make the very act of buying a skateboarding content pack so much of a barrier? We know the answer is “To make as much money as possible with microtransactions and premium currency”, and that is Ubisoft’s prerogative as a business. However, when the competition offers such strong experiences which are easier to get your hands on, and more importantly do not come loaded with microtransactions, I can’t help but feel like Riders Republic shoots itself in the foot before that foot has even stood on a skateboard.
Riders Republic, a game synonymous with snowboarding and mountain biking, is not at the forefront of any core skateboarder’s mind. The game is fighting for attention in a crowded genre – a genre so crowded that Activision reportedly put a new THPS on ice because they were concerned they would not be able to compete. If the highest selling franchise in skateboarding video game history is worried about overcrowding, then any new game hoping for a piece of the pie needs to go hard on making their experience the best. And off the gate, the skateboarding update for Riders Republic just hasn’t done that for me.
I Finally Got To Skate
So, after all of this bellyaching about microtransactions and UX, and waiting for the content to be actually available, I managed to get skating. Here’s the bad news: I don’t think the skateboarding in Riders Republic is very good. There are a couple of factors for this, so let me break them down.
Controls
First of all Riders Republic is a game that was clearly never built for skateboarding. It really is a game built off the back of snowboarding, and you can tell. Snowboarding games and skateboarding games, in general, have never really handled in a similar way. Snowboarding titles seem to emphasise the “wind up” (e.g. hold a button down to wind up a jump in a certain direction/rotation).
This is because snowboards, by their very nature, do not behave like skateboards. They are attached to your feet, you don’t pop a snowboard. You don’t “flip” a snowboard. Snowboarding tricks are all based around rotations, grabs and grinds. So, the issue with Riders Republic is that it’s a game whose whole control scheme is built to appeal to this style of riding.
The snowboarding in Riders Republic has always been clearly where most of the focus was spent. When you play it, it kinda just makes sense. You hold the Right Trigger to build speed, Left Trigger to slow down, and you use the face buttons to wind up jumps in the direction of each face button. You can tap any of the face buttons for a little hop off the ground, or hold it down to start doing backflips or 720’s. As I said, in snowboarding terms, this all makes sense.
You can carve quarters, pop little ollies out of them, and cruise around nicely enough, but it’s where skateboarding differs from snowboarding where the controls fall apart. Many skateboarding tricks are based off of a single trick: The Ollie. What Riders Republic does is assign 4 face buttons to ollies, and curiously the top one lets you nollie (but you can’t spin these or else you faceplant). If you hold the top or bottom one down after you ollie, your character just does a massive faceplant or smacks their head on the floor. Using the left or right buttons will let you spin, but the spinning is so exaggerated that you will pop and most likely do a 360. There isn’t a lot of precision in it, and it takes a lot of getting used to – what’s clear is this is a system designed for you to huck massive triple backflips off snowy cliffs, not do low impact Back 180s on flat.
What I will say is that to make up for the fiddly controls, the game does a good job of reacting to where you have landed. If you land on stairs, or ride over stairs, your character will firecracker down them (which is pretty neat). Sometimes this kinda breaks and you firecracker up stairs, which is sort of funny, but still the game is quite forgiving with the way you move, and doesn’t punish you for bad landings nearly as much as it does for other sports.
And, as a final note – You default to Regular footing in Riders Republic. There is no Goofy foot. You cannot change this in the settings. You can “Switch Stance” with a button press, which is very nice – however skating “Goofy” labels all your tricks as “Switch”… which is just fundamentally wrong. As a Goofy skater, it’s frustrating as hell, because the game will always try its damn hardest to force you back into Regular stance, like it’s the “right” way to ride a skateboard. This is odd given that Goofy stance is a thing in snowboarding as well, and overall it’s just a weird oversight that should have been addressed long before this update.
Tricks
When you throw grabs and flip tricks into the mix, it just becomes a mess. Flip tricks are done by popping using a face button, then holding the right or left trigger mid-air, and then flicking the left stick. This is actually how all the snowboard grabs work (and all tricks for all sports in the game for that matter), so it’s no surprise it’s consistent here – It just doesn’t fit with skateboarding’s quicker, low impact pace. Snowboards and Mountain Bikes get huge air, allowing you time to adjust and react accordingly, however with Skateboarding it all just kinda becomes a fumble to do something/anything. Grabs have been pushed onto the left bumper when in mid air. I understand the reasoning for this – and when you master the controls you can chain together a flip into a grab very convincingly.
Grinds make sense – land on a rail or ledge, and you will grind. The grind system is actually one of the best things in this game. Once you land in a grind, you can use the left stick to combo into another grind. This leads to some very realistic looking grind switching, allowing you to perform some of the most realistic ledge dancing I’ve seen in a released video game yet. I managed to do a Krook to Back Lip, and it looked fantastic. You can take this to extremes, doing mad 10 grind combos with no ollie out – Boardslide to Krooked to Blunt to Noseslide and so on – and the whole combo will look quite natural despite being unrealistic.
Where the grinds fall down is on ramps. I could not figure out a consistent way to get into grinds on transition. Pushing forward on the left stick would sometimes push me into a Noseslide or Nosestall. Sometimes riding on the coping would initiate a 5050 or boardslide. It’s all very fiddly, and it continues an annoying trend of modern skateboarding games completely failing when it comes to transition skating.
Every team making these games seems to think that transition skating is either performing giant airs (which is only true if you’re Grant Taylor or Bob Burnquist), or the same as skating a bank to block where you ollie or flip into every lip trick (which is only true if you’re Daewon Song). The only games to get close to the feel or riding into a grind or lip trick on transition are THPS and Skate3, and even then they both fall short in their own ways. Many skateboarding games are so obsessed with the feel of doing a 900 Japan Air Backflip that they ignore, and fail at, the very basic entry level transition tricks like slash grinds or even rock fakies. I feel like they all take a “run before you can walk” approach to transition, and Riders Republic disappointingly continues the trend.
The main problem with the trick system is that there is no rhyme or reason for how each trick is assigned. Doing a Kickflip requires you to press RT and Up on the Left Stick. Doing an Impossible is LT and Right on the Left Stick. And I can’t remember what the controls for each grab even are. In other games built for skateboarding the controls make sense given the rotation of the flip: THPS’ kickflip (in goofy stance) is Right and Square, as you kick right when you kickflip in goofy stance. Doing a kickflip in skate (in goofy stance) has you flick the stick up to the top right position, again to match your foot movement. Riders Republic has you push in almost random directions compared to your actual foot movements, making it hard to learn which combo gives you which trick.
To be fair, these controls break away from convention in a gigantic way. It’s not wrong for Riders Republic to try something different, but it feels so far removed from what every other skateboarding game has established as a decent control scheme. It takes a lot of getting used to, and that would be fine if this game was a hardcore simulation like Session, but I really feel like Riders Republic is going for a THPS meets Skate approach, and in that regard it just doesn’t compete.
Level Design
Every sport in Riders Republic has a “home base” on the game’s expansive map. Skateboarding has been given a huge area called “The Deck”. The Deck is split into a selection of skateparks, some are transition based, some are street/plaza based. There are some interesting spots to be skated on The Deck, but overall from a skatepark design perspective, they just don’t flow very well.
Again, I really think this is because the game is a snowboarding/biking game. You can imagine a lot of these skateparks and areas working very well for snowboards or BMX bikes – but they just don’t work well for skateboards. You have ledges leading to grass landings, you have landing areas for stair sets running into another landing area for a stair set, and every quarter pipe is over-sized and seems designed for transfer opportunities.
This is fundamentally a problem with Riders Republics’ “Jack Of All Trades” approach. Everything is designed through the lens of the core sport this game was designed for, and what you end up with is something that doesn’t really tick the boxes for the other sports included, at the detriment of not serving content to Snowboarding players.
As with everything in this game, you can take anything, and ride it anywhere – so you can take your skateboard to the BMX park area and hit up rails, stairs and quarters there. This is pretty cool, as there is actually more to skate than you first realise. Having said that, venturing up north to the snowboard areas, or exploring the other canyon areas in the south of the map outside the BMX park, you won’t really find much to do. You can bomb hills here and there, but the skateboard loses tons of speed on dirt and snow, so really the only place this thing is of any use is at The Deck.
The map is absolutely huge, and whilst you get plenty of places to use the wingsuit, mountain bike and BMX in Riders Republic, the skateboard by comparison can only really be used at a very small selection of places, which gives a false perception of how much there is to really do if you’re in her for the skateboarding alone. There is entertainment to be gathered from flailing down a waterfall with your skateboard, but other than that you likely won’t leave The Deck if you’re playing this for the skateboard content.
Pictured: Me skateboarding down a waterfall
Authenticity
So all of these things combine to make an unsatisfying experience – and this is exacerbated with a profound lack of real authenticity. The only skateboarding brands represented here are Pizza, and Powell Peralta. Pizza is so obscure that I’ve barely heard of them past the odd Thrasher video, and Powell Peralta are so out of the loop of core skateboarding that you might as well just have Airwalk shoes instead.
I often mention this when reviewing Skateboarding Games, and a lack of authenticity is such a subtle thing that can poison your game from the top down. This isn’t just “oh they don’t have the right brands” – a lack of true understanding of skateboarding culture hampers your game mechanics, your level design, your campaign structure, and overall it will just turn off the very audience you wish to attract if you don’t fix it.
The reason why OlliOlli World, for example, is better than Riders Republic, is because they understand nuanced, small details of what makes a skateboard interesting to ride. Everything from board customisation, to the small, little details of skateboard crews that shows they understand the sub-culture. Even the wacky, cartoon-ish levels with giant, unrealistic gaps flow correctly in terms of actual skate spots.
Say what you want about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and it’s wild skyline combo lines, but the core controls of the game boil down to getting the basics right: Doing an ollie is accessible, and everything else that was deemed “unrealistic” builds from a place of authenticity and satisfaction performing basic moves that Riders Republic is simply lacking.
With this lack of authenticity, and an almost naive concentration on the bigger, more fantastical elements of skateboarding like Mega Ramps and the X-Games, Riders Republic just doesn’t feel satisfying to me as a skateboarder. This is by far the most middle of the road, mainstream interpretation of what the public thinks skateboarding is, in a video game. This is the video game equivalent of your non-skater friends sending you a video of Leticia Bufoni doing that FS 180 over a dinosaur skeleton at the Natural History Museum that you saw a month ago, with the comment “So cool, have you seen this? It’s really cool.”, whilst you sit there nodding politely thinking “Yeah I saw this a month ago, but thanks anyway”.
Riders Republic likes the idea of skateboarding, but it doesn’t really understand it. It’s skateboarding spoken through the language of snowboarding, and truthfully that’s not really what any of us are looking for. This reminds me of the time I went snowboarding, and the instructor asked “Does anyone here skateboard?”, and when I said “Yes”, she replied “Well, you’ll find this easy”. I did not find snowboarding easy, and I believe anyone who thinks they are one and the same just doesn’t really understand either.
In the same way that I would likely struggle to design an authentic snowboarding experience, I think Riders Republic was always going to struggle to deliver an authentic skateboarding experience. This is fine. However, as mentioned earlier – with such a crowded market for authentic skateboarding experiences, Riders Republic could not afford to disappoint. At best, skateboarding feels tacked on in this game, something rushed in to cash in on the success of other games, but without the full effort to give it its own title.
The bottom line is that skateboarding in Riders Republic is not an enjoyable experience. It’s weaker than a lot of the other sports in the game. The combination of the clunky controls, with the oddly designed skateparks, just means you end up doing random tricks, and landing anything at all feels like some kind of victory as you conquer the confusion found somewhere between how the game thinks skateboarding works, and how it actually works.
Because the game wants to be on the arcadey side, the focus is always on points as well – this is literally how the snowboarding portion of the game works. So, realism and authenticity isn’t really the best way to succeed. Kickflipping a giant gap will net you less points than doing a stupid 20 trick ledge dance on a long curb. This is a high score chaser, but with less speed, accessibility and precision than THPS. It wants to be right in the middle of THPS and Skate, but lacks the understanding of either franchise’s basics to deliver.
The joy of modern skateboarding games is identifying a trick, and figuring it out. The satisfaction comes from landing a trick you set out to land. In Riders Republic, the weird, panicked fighting with the controls becomes half the battle – and by the time you get anywhere near close to the trick you want to perform, you don’t feel satisfaction. You just feel sort of empty, as you look at the score, instead of whether your skater did the right trick.
Add to this that the replay editor in the game is weaker than the competition. As strong as Riders Republic is as a snowboarding game, or a mountain biking game, every feature in this game does not compete with other skateboarding titles – and by adding skateboarding, the emperor’s new clothes have been revealed.
Conclusion
I just want to say that as disappointed as I was with the skateboarding update for Riders Republic, I am not saying Riders Republic is bad. It is quite an awesome achievement, and I’ve had a lot of fun with the game playing with the other sports prior to this update. It is it’s own weird thing, and it has fantastic presentation, awesome graphics, and really scratches that late 2000’s extreme sports itch. Playing the game just made me feel like I was watching the Extreme Channel in 2010 again – seeing Red Bull branded videos of people flying wingsuits through hazardous canyons.
My issue is that, as someone who is so close to skateboarding, I’ve seen our little corner of the extreme sports world move on. Back in 2010, a skateboarding game with this exact control scheme and level of authenticity might have been a runaway success, even potentially competing against the mighty Skate franchise. But we’ve survived a drought of games, we’ve been treated to some incredibly detailed simulations. We’ve seen the godfather of the modern skateboarding game return and outsell everyone. And skateboarding itself is at an all time popularity spike.
I don’t think Riders Republic really needed skateboarding, and from what I’ve played I don’t think it succeeds at making a satisfying version of it. It gives the illusion of being a deep, creative translation of skateboarding, but really the controls are shallow, sort of confusing and don’t give me, as a player, the power to do the specific tricks I want to perform. Riders Republic has never exactly been a deep, simulation type game, and the approach to skateboarding here was always bound to disappoint, as the developers wanted to give us freedom to perform skateboarding moves, but without a core system that could ever handle the complexity of tricks modern players wish to perform.
The final comparison I will make is between this game, and the in development Skate reboot. Skate (as much as people complain about the parkour elements shown in trailers) really is concentrating on giving players huge creative freedom with their actions. They have talked up really obscure “core” skateboarding tricks like wallies and slappies being in the game. Their focus is on skateboarding, and they are all in on trying to give you all the tools to full skateboarding freedom, built specifically for that purpose.
Riders Republic, as a game, will never have wallies or slappies. It just isn’t built for it. It’s surface level. Past all the sheen and the shiny, polished environments, if you look closely you will see that Riders Republic cynically encourages you to come and have fun and purchase microtransactions to stay in the party, but only if you play by the rules of a game engine built for snowboarding. It is not built specifically for us, and in that regard it will never satisfy what we, as skateboarders, want from it.
So, if you must play Riders Republic – go in knowing this isn’t a skateboarding game. It’s a really good snowboarding, mountain biking, BMX, wingsuit, extreme sports extravaganza, which happens to have some disappointing skateboarding as a side activity. It doesn’t succeed as a skateboarding game, and that’s OK, because it definitely succeeds as a snowboarding game.
The Terrible Company 