Skateboarding is just an accepted activity where anyone is willing to spend a chunk of cash on a piece of wood with wheels on it, and spend hours practising how not to fall over. It’s typically painted in a radical light, but Eddy Games has put a claiming technicolour filter over that light to bring us Hippy Skate. You’re following a band of hippies who happen to be skaters as they drive around a surprisingly diverse environment looking for places to shred. Pick the skater that most resembles what think you may have looked like in the sixties and prove that there’s another way to get high.
What is Hippy Skate?
When it comes to skating games, the story usually finds a reason not to show up because we’re perfectly fine with focusing on pulling off crazy tricks and wiping out spectacularly. Hippy Skate is the same way where the story is up to interpretation. Since you’re following hippies around in their van, you can argue that they’re on some sort of road trip. However, instead of following the footsteps of a music tour or some such festival, these hippies are content to spend lives reaching the most skateboard-friendly areas that the van can reach. Maybe if you collect enough radical hippies, you may gain enough open minds to skateboard to nirvana.
Gameplay Experience
If you’re planning to take up skateboarding, you’d better have a good handle on the physics and control. Hippy Skate brings this across in elements of the gameplay and presentation. The biggest is the fact that this is a skating game for the casual player who prefers shorter bursts of radical feeling. There’s a pretty wide selection of environments that each has several contained levels to play through. Even though the tracks are small, there’s enough challenge in their layouts to keep you engaged.
This is not a traditional skateboarding game since it focuses more on timing than going super fast and ripping sweet tricks. The inputs are simple and few, but are enough to pump the skateboarding fuel directly into your body. It takes only a few moments to get into the skating mindset – and before you know it, you’re examining every hill and dip along the track, trying to find the best spots to leap and crouch. The fact that you can build up such speed in a small area will no doubt have you tripping out on all the background features swirling around you.
The Fall of Hippy Skate
Just in case you weren’t aware, skateboarding is a dangerous sport that can ruin more than your career if you don’t take the proper precautions. Hippy Skate takes some, but sadly not enough. The most glaring issue is the presence of false variety. There are indeed a lot of environments and levels, but aside from a few differing background assets, they don’t have anything distinct about them. The same goes for the cadre of skateboarders that join your road trip. They share a nice mix of colour and details, but they all control the same and bring nothing new to the actual skating.
There’s also a lack of challenge in a game where every level is essentially a skateboard puzzle. You need to collect the floating symbols placed around the track to complete the level. In some moments, you can get them all by just going super fast and flying through the air. Unless there are obstacles on the track, you’ll be completely safe to soar around without care until you hit the sweet spot to get the final floater.
Skate Onward
Hippy Skate is a casual 3D skating game about hippies skating in different spots along a winding road. It’s a fun little break with colour and flair in levels that can get your energy pumping with how quickly you can get speeding and jumping. The problem is that the variety stops at the colours since the content and the challenges are noticeably lacking. It does provide entertainment as you wonder whether or not these hippies would rather be shredding on guitars instead of skateboards.