This was a difficult review to write as I was very torn on Session. However, I have to be truthful to myself and how I play, and unfortunately, I really did not enjoy my time with Session. Allow me to explain.
Session is a skateboarding sim that is developed by Crea-ture Studios Inc and published by Nacon. You’re free to traverse (on your board or on foot) or fast travel to various different locations at will. Missions will grant you the opportunity to unlock gear and cosmetics so you can change your character to have a more personalised look. You also have 3 areas you can visit, all open from the beginning and which you can reach by fast travelling.
The only characters are static NPC’s that wait to hand you a mission. They’ll only spare a few lines of unvoiced dialogue at the beginning and end of missions, mainly to give you a brief explanation of how to do a trick. They’re not up for repeating any guidance they hand out, so if you can’t nail the trick they just watch you fail, over and over again. At one point I had to look up a YouTube video just to see roughly how to pass a mission. That shouldn’t be the way to play a game.
I’ll try to explain how the controls work. Depending on your stance when you get on the board, one thumbstick represents the front foot, and the other the back foot. If you’re firmly standing on the board, pushing in a particular direction will be where you place the weight on each foot. Pull back with your back foot and you can do different tricks than you can do on the front foot. It’s all very confusing, especially as someone who doesn’t skate in real life, which probably doesn’t help.
I found Session to be unnecessarily difficult. I feel Crea-ture have gone down the route of making it too hard, making it difficult to enjoy. It would be nice if you had the option of simple mode or hard mode, but I found it got to the point where I was repeating the same mission over and over again and not getting any good results, which sapped any fun I might have otherwise been having. When it takes you over an hour to finish one mission, you start to lose interest quickly. It’s sometimes not very clear what you actually need to do. I feel the tutorials could do with some work to make them far easier to understand, as it is there’s a lot of vagueness to the explanations.
I also felt that there was too much lag in terms of my inputs having an effect on screen. Every now and again I would go to do an ollie and it would happen that bit later than I’d want, causing me to crash into the wall.
The skate areas also felt completely empty. I checked my settings and found that this is by default and you can actually add pedestrians to the game, but even then it doesn’t add much at all. You can’t even run them over, they just run away as soon as you stake towards them. It actually makes it more annoying.
The music isn’t great either, with a distinct lack of skater-style tracks that might have alleviated the otherwise frustrating gameplay a little. And while there’s not much of a story, a lack of any sort of voice work means I lost interest in what people had to say very quickly. Even a few lines before missions would have helped here.
Conclusion
Those looking to Session to fill a Skate-shaped hole in their gaming life are likely to be sorely disappointed. It is not an easy game to learn, but more importantly, it’s also not a fun one either. Some better tutorials or alternate control options might have saved the game a little, but as it is I just can’t find any reason to recommend this to anyone outside of truly dedicated skaters willing to put the grind in.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
