Oct 24

Oct 24 Review | Skatebird - Wing and A Prayer

I love the very rotund mourning dove that likes to perch at the peak of my roof and coo every morning. I love the red-winged blackbirds that flock to the old, gnarled tree at the end of my road. I love the family of hawks that roost at the edge of the woods in my backyard. Grackles, finches, chickadees; they’re all great. In summary: I love birds. I love skateboarding too, even if I mostly stick to longboarding now. I also love those YouTube channels that are just “10 hours of lofi beats to chill and study to.” That last one is a personal flaw that I refuse to work on.

Skatebird succeeds at engaging two of these three loves of mine. Unfortunately, it fails the last one to a damning degree.

“Randomize Bird”, might be one of the best menu options of 2021.

When starting Skatebird, the game immediately opens to a character creation screen. Or rather, a bird creation screen. I spent a lot of time here, as there are just so many customisation options. Species of bird, hats, eyewear, and backpacks are among the options the player can customise on their bird. I was particularly impressed by the sheer number of different bird species I was able to choose from. Although I was sad that my favourite species, the bluejay, wasn’t there, it was hard to be too disappointed thanks to just how many different species the developers actually did include. I normally take a while to create characters, tweaking every little value to make sure they’re exactly how I want them to be, and I took even longer in Skatebird’s menus because of just how fun it was to create different birds and dress them up in silly little hats.

The other thing that immediately struck me upon starting Skatebird was the music that accompanied my bird creation session. The soundtrack, composed by Nathan Scott Madsen, is absolutely fantastic. My favourite tracks are ones like “Sophie and the Blackbirds” and “Growing Up Red Tails”, which mix funky basslines, chill drum tracks, bird calls, and audio samples of narrations from old bird documentaries. Hearing the documentaries brought me back to watching old nature films with my grandparents, going birdwatching, and hiking around nature centres as a kid, and the instrumentals on the soundtrack only further amplified the cosy vibes.

After creating my bird (a stellar jay with glasses, a beanie, and a hipsack), and sitting at the menu listening to the soundtrack for a bit, I was ready to start skating. Unfortunately, this is when things took a turn. Playing on the Switch, the game is rough on a technical level. The camera stutters when you move it, and the framerate is inconsistent. Things further than a couple of feet in front of your bird are blurry, as if there’s a PS1 filter over them. It was bad enough that I quickly developed a headache, and had to stop playing.

If you ever wondered what it is like being nearsighted…

Skatebird is also on Xbox GamePass, so I turned on my Xbox and downloaded the game to check it out there. On the Xbox Series X, the game was more playable. The framerate is more stable, and while things in the distance are still strangely blurry, they’re not as smeared looking as they are on the Switch. Even so, the stuttering camera issue on Xbox too. Thankfully, the team knows about this issue and is working on a fix.

“Honey, I told you not grind on the bread!”

Performance issues aside, the game has further, less patch-able, problems when it comes to how Skatebird plays. While the actual physics of a bird on a skateboard would obviously be weird in real life, the skating in-game is just not as responsive as you would like from an arcade skater. The player feels floaty, which again, makes sense being a bird on a skateboard, but that mostly makes performing tricks frustrating and trying to navigate the environments a struggle. However, the actual design of the environments is very charming. You play as a small bird in a big world and skate around pizza boxes, kitchen tables, magazines, and other household items. It’s all very fun to look at, but unfortunately not fun to skate in due to the imprecise controls.

As far as skating goes, you’re free to roam around the levels all you want, but there are also optional challenges and collectables scattered around à la Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Some of the challenges are provided by other birds with charming dialogue. Due to the technical issues though, I, unfortunately, didn’t get very far into these challenges, despite them unlocking more fun customisation options.

I don’t know… Based solely on this one screenshot, this is the greatest game of the last ten years.

My experience with playing Skatebird was largely a frustrating one, mainly thanks to technical issues and floaty controls but despite the game’s issues I was very charmed by it. The birds are cute and fun to customise, the soundtrack is fantastic and catchy, and the environments are a joy to look at, leading to vibes that are, as the kids say, chill. While I wouldn’t recommend buying Skatebird until some patches happen. However, if you have Xbox GamePass, it’s still worth a look even just to create your own skater-bird while vibing out to the soundtrack.