Salty Peaks Reviews Transworld Endless Skater Game

Today marks the release of the new mobile game from SuperVillain Studios and Transworld Skateboarding, Transworld Endless Skate.  Being some what of a nerd for anything with a screen, I took it upon myself to download this FREE game and give it a shot. It’s available in both the App Store, Google Play Store, and Amazon Appstore, so if you’re like me and aren’t super cool enough to have an iPhone, you can still enjoy it.

First things first, I should mention that the game is pretty large. It didn’t take too long to download, but I’d recommend doing it while connected to Wi-Fi in case you have a crappy data plan.

Right when you open Endless Skater, you have to sign in with an e-mail. I chose my G-Mail account, but it said there was a problem communicating with Google’s servers and then the game quit. This has happened to me with other apps, so I’m assuming that since it just came out today, there are probably a ton of people trying to connect, so just I resigned in to to my G-Mail, and it worked fine. Then you’re hit with the menu:

Try to ignore Flo’s face, she’s everywhere in this game.

When you hit play, it immediately jumps you into a tutorial. I would highly recommend not just trying to breeze through this, because the game is actually pretty tricky and has a lot to remember, so give the tutorial a fair chance. Here’s a breakdown of the controls:

• Tap the right half area of the screen to start skating.
• Hold down right side of the screen to crouch, release to ollie. The longer you hold it, the higher you ollie.
• To change which lane you are skating in while on the ground, swipe Up/Down or Left/Right in the Lower Left area of the screen.
• To do flip tricks, swipe up, down, or left in the lower right area of the screen. You can hold it for more points, but let go before you hit the ground.
• For grab tricks, swipe left, right, up, or down in the upper right area of the screen for grabs.
• To do grinds, ollie near a rail, then tap the upper left area of the screen to land on the rail and grind it. For a boardslide, swipe right in the same area before hitting the rail.
• While in the air, tilt your device left or right to spin.

One nice thing is that when you tap an area, a lightly colored box appears, showing the area you have to work with to do tricks. Green is Go/Ollie/Grabs, Yellow is Flip Tricks, Red is Change Lanes, Blue is Grinds. But once you get the jist, it’s time to play.

As you probably figured from the first image, you can skate as professional skateboarders Danny Way, Sean Malto, Ryan Decenzo, Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins-Pastrana, and Christian Hosoi… but you have to earn it. You start the game as SuperVillian’s version of an average skater, Eddie Genericson.

 I wanted to play as the legendary Christian Hosoi, but I am no where near good enough.

Once Eddie’s ready to ride, it shows you the trick list, which is a nice reminder before you get thrown in to the perpetual motion machine that is each level and you’re blanking on what to do in the air. The more you play, the cooler tricks you can do. Pretty simple.

Then you pick your level. If you geeked out on the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games like me, you’ll be happy to know that some of the developers of Endless Skater helped develop the original THPS franchise. After learning that, I immediately noticed similarities in the levels such as the school, one of my personal favorites.

The idea of the game is to keep reaching the target score as it grows, gaining you more time and more $$$ to unlock levels, tricks, and skaters. I tried to snap some screen shots of the gameplay, but it’s very difficult to do so while doing something cool, so if you don’t like these mediocre game play pictures, you should probably just download it yourself.

Here’s some final thoughts:

• It was a little hard to get used to, but very entertaining once you get the hang of it. It’s a lot to remember, because you have to swipe certain directions in certain squares to do specific tricks, all while tilting your device if you want to spin, but it’s no more to think about than a game like Call of Duty, so you can handle it.
• There are ads, but it’s free so can’t get too pissed about it. Plus skateboarding these days is starting to feel like one big advertisement so you should be used to it.
• It could be because my phone is older, but I noticed that this game DRAINED my battery. In the 15 minutes I spent downloading and trying it, my phone went from 88% battery to 70%, so maybe have a charger handy.

Overall, I would definitely recommend Transworld Endless Skater. As someone who was obsessed with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, I’m stoked to see a similar style game that’s very user friendly, free, and playable on a phone. Nice work TWS and SuperVillain.