ast year Skate took the industry by surprise by not only winning sports game of the year but redefining the skateboarding genre. The developer faced a tough challenge: create a skate game that’s new and fresh. With the Tony Hawk franchise approaching a decade of dominance, Skate developer Black Box took that challenge one step further by revolving the game around just skateboarding and nothing else. Now after outselling the latest Tony Hawk 2 to 1, EA and Black Box are hard at work on Skate 2. We jetted off to the Bay Area to get our first look and hands-on time with the game.

Skate introduced us to the city of San Vanelona, a California-inspired setting that featured all of the locations a skater would find attractive. Sprawling suburbs with pools to ride and hills to bomb. A bustling downtown with huge handrails and funky sculptures. Even skate parks and community centers with no traffic or pedestrians to worry about. But all of that would soon be lost. In a not-so-serious game plot, San Vanelona is destroyed (no one got hurt) by a natural disaster in Skate It (Wii). Five years later, a large corporation rebuilds the city from scratch to what we see in Skate 2. Black box is promising us bigger and better.

One of the coolest new features added to the world of Skate is the ability to get off your board. While this may seem like a no-brainer, it’s what you can do that while on foot that takes the cake. Instead of adding a park creator, Black Box unbolted all of the small objects in the world. Now the player can drag rails, picnic tables and anything else not nailed down anywhere they want. If you want to grab an awesome bench from one part of the city and spend the 45 minutes it would take to drag it across the map, by all means go for it. And this isn’t a simple grid system; you could drag a picnic table up onto a set of stairs and use it as a faux handrail. Getting off your board will also be useful for obvious things like getting out of a tough spot or climbing a set of stairs to access something easier.

The development team has also increased the arsenal of tricks at the players’ disposal. The Flickit control system was a great way to get the feeling that you’re actually doing something when you execute a move. It basically made kickflips fun again, which as any skater knows, they should always be fun. For Skate 2, a bunch of new trick have been added without changing any of the controls. The best example is the fingerflip, a grab move where the skater makes the board do a kickflip by using his finger in mid-air. To perform this, the player simply holds the grab button and executes a kickflip on the stick. The team did add one new button called the “grab the world button.” This will serve as a way to perform handplant-based tricks on various places throughout the world. The final addition to the trick system is taking one foot off of the board. This has been integrated with the left and right pushing buttons. This adds old favorites like fast plants and no complies.

The last new bit that we saw was the new downhill racing. Previously, the racing was just down on the streets of San Vanelona. Now the city comes with access to a mountain area with a huge street course. We did a race that had the same checkpoint system as the first game but this time it was faster and much more dangerous. Winding down the mountain, there were a ton of obstacles in the form of road construction. Cones, pipes and gaps were either a pest that cause a crash or a totally awesome place to get a trick in during the race.

The first Skate game put a wonderful emphasis on the realism of the sport. Part of that was capturing the feel of riding itself and the tricks the pro perform via the Flickit control system. The other part of capturing that feeling was the authenticity of the sport itself. Skateboarding never takes itself seriously. A lot of publications gave the first game a hard time because of the sponsor logo plastering all over. While it may seem like another EA advertising annoyance, it’s actually an important part of the skate culture. A sponsor pays a skateboard to wake up and skateboard all day. Black Box knows this, and that’s why while you may think they were paid a hefty sum by say, Thrasher for their involvement, this is not the case. There was no money involved with the inclusion of the famous skate magazine; it was included for authenticity on both sides. This philosophy will translate over to Skate 2 100 percent. The core idea of Skate is to just skateboard, and the core idea of skateboarding is to have fun.

The time we spent with Skate 2 was short but oh so sweet. With the inclusion of new tricks, a fresh city and the movable objects, Black Box is really building on the foundation that they have created from the first game. Anyone who enjoyed the first game should not be disappointed with its successor. While we were not told a release date for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, getting hands on with the game is a good sign that the developer is on the right track. Stay tuned for a full producer interview on the game tomorrow where we dive into the small bits of the game like complaints from the first title.