When you’re making indie games that are very obviously inspired by bigger and more well-known franchises and styles of play, there’s absolutely a fair degree of risk involved. Aside from your experience being too much like some other making it feel derivative, there’s also the possibility that you’ll fall far enough short of the high mark set by an iconic game that yours will fall on its face. Granted, even if you’re unable to take on a big league title head to head, if you’re at least able to get somewhere close to them in terms of feel and quality you could still do pretty well.

In the case of Skatesterre, there’s no question that it set its sights on the Tony Hawk franchise, indeed almost to a painful extent in some ways. It’s one thing to feature the same mix of tricks and varied level objectives as that series, but in this case when many of the stages start to feel like almost direct copies of well-known ones people have played before, the game strays into dangerous territory. If you’re looking to attract a crowd already well aware of a major series, they’re also going to be the ones who’ll quickly realize quite a bit of outright copying off of someone else’s designs.

If the game only suffered from a case of feeling uninspired it would be one thing, but when it also fails to do anything at all to get you oriented in the least, it really starts to shoot itself in the foot. With no guidance to be found at all, I actually struggled at first just to figure out how to get moving. By contrast, bigger series like Tony Hawk will carefully walk you through at least the basics, but here it feels like the developers were satisfied with a “let them figure it out” approach, which will absolutely alienate new players, but may even frustrate veterans. Throw in multiple other issues like the camera crowding your skater quite a bit, the rate of movement feeling on the fast side, and even some periodic performance hitches here and there, and the game really does itself no favors. If it’s only meant for hard core Tony Hawk fans, why would they settle for a pretender instead of sticking with the real deal? But if it’s for everyone else, why would you make no effort to get them on board, setting them up for enjoyment instead of frustration? This just feels like a collection of unforced errors that the overall game is unable to recover from.