Is Black Box struggling to meet EA’s demands for speedy sequel turnaround? More importantly, are they struggling to make the third game in their series enough of a departure from the previous two to be warranted? Both questions will be answered come May, when Skate 3 is released, but for now there are reasons for cautious optimism, albeit with a healthy dose of fan’s concern.

The good news: Skate 3 is set in a completely new city, Port Carverton, moving away from Skate 2’s disappointing rejigged San Vanelona. Jason DeLong, the game’s senior producer, tells us that it’s a more skateboarding-friendly town: “Skate 2 was a gritty game, it was a darker game, and that was a theme of the game. San Vanelona was a less friendly game for skaters, there were security guards everywhere, there were skate stoppers. Port Carverton is the complete opposite of that, it definitely embraces skateboarding and it brings a more inviting style to the game as whole; it’s brighter, it’s crisper.” We’re also told that since the team have spent two games working out how to build worlds to skate in, the new city will be a skater’s paradise. Here’s hoping this doesn’t mean stooping to a ‘quarter pipes instead of right-angles’ approach, and instead implies a focus on interesting geography, multitudinous lines, and natural-looking street environments. Apart from the aforementioned grittiness, skating looks and feels almost identical to Skate 2; so it’s faster and lighter than the original. Off-the-board play has been improved, with your skater moving in a far less tank-like fashion, and bails are slightly more realistic – players are more likely to stumble and hold up their hands to protect themselves.

Trickwise, we’re only shown two additions: darkslides and underflips. They’re just about worked into the existing, fairly intuitive control scheme. Darkslides, for example, are achieved by performing a kick- or heelflip, holding R1 to catch the board midflip, and landing in a boardslide position on a grindable surface. Because it’s so removed from other tricks, it feels like a gimmick, and certainly won’t help any fears that the series is getting less realistic.

The constant need to add ‘new’ features means that this year, according to DeLong; “it’s all about teams”. The single-player campaign sees your character from the previous games move from a ‘skate legend’ to a ‘skate icon’. Semantic issues with this aside, this basically means you’ll be putting together a skate brand (EA loves brands), and hiring skaters to join your team. Time will tell whether or not the narrative reaches a postmodernist climax in which you star in a licensed videogame. Or maybe we’ll have to wait for Skate 4, as you move from ‘skate icon’ to ‘skate deity’.

Anyway, our playtest lets Black Box push the team side of Skate 3’s online multiplayer component. Two teams of three take each other in a variety of game modes. First up is an own the spot style game in which members of each team must perform tricks on 9 different objects or areas in an enclosed area. It’s really just a team-based version of a challenge from previous games, but fairly entertaining nonetheless. ‘1-UP’ is a team version of S.K.A.T.E. – set an accumulative group score and hope the other team doesn’t beat it. You’ve got about 30 seconds to score your points, but if any of your team bail, the round is over. So, even though EA’s server problems meant I was playing 1v3 on my own, Mark Cullinane’s sabotage meant I was able to glide to victory while he tripped over another curb ‘accidentally’. Team death races are self-explanatory, with points awarded for position meaning that technically no-one in your team needs to finish first for a victory.

It’s certainly going to be worth keeping an eye on. Features were mentioned that don’t feel quite as much like they were added for the sake of it – skate park creation, and ‘skate.School’ as well as other help for new players all look interesting – but the promise that you can affect the city around you doesn’t seem to amount to much more than having your logo appear on billboards. Let’s hope that it is a case of ‘team up, throw down’ as DeLong claims, rather than the less palatable alternative; ‘team down, throw up’.