A level traversing multiple rooftops could have aided navigation with some visual cues to distinguish the roofs from one another, but instead it's samey and confusing. The first level features multiple elevated platforms that can be fiddly to climb to and are extremely easy to fall from, which isn’t a helpful introduction to the game. More major problems lie in the level design – both the parks and the challenges set within them. The camera can be unpleasantly spasmodic, especially on resetting your bird, which is so repeatable a problem that it’s infuriating. The trick names and scores are not displayed prominently, making combo building feel empty and tricks indistinct, especially when a bird sticking its beak on the board is less relatable and much harder to parse than a human skater’s grab. Some eminently fixable niggles also hold back the fun. An element of pinball chaos in such situations would have been preferable: the strictness of the skill demand is unnecessarily po-faced for such a silly game concept. Getting lodged against furniture and jammed in corners is frequent and finicky, with your bird far too ready to fall over altogether. The workings of the air ollie are somewhat inscrutable and it just feels irritating to have to execute it. While the fundamentals of the gameplay work – you can navigate, you can do tricks – it isn’t nearly as fun as it looks and certainly can’t stack up to the Tony Hawk’s series, to which comparison is inevitable. The fantastic idea of mini real-world skateparks also falls flat in practice, with inspiration running short after the first level, and a rooftop park bringing little that reads as less than human-sized anyway. It really only adds confusion to the visual cues for traversing obstacles when your jump height is harder to grasp. The potential of wings to bring a lift to the formula is not realised, with the second ollie failing to introduce creativity to trick lines. The bad news is that while the ambition soars, the concept doesn’t exactly land.
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