SkateBIRD is a third-person skateboarding sports game. You play as someone's pet bird who has been trained to ride a miniature skateboard. Your owner, "Big Friend", is going through some rough times and you are on a mission to help them feel better.
Most of the game revolves around completing short missions and tasks that involve using the skateboard to accomplish some set of feats. From grinding across gaps, to transferring (think "mantling" but with a skateboard) over obstacles or through tight spaces, or simply riding around and collecting things.
Each task brings you closer to figuring out what's wrong with Big Friend and how to help them. You'll meet and enlist the aid of several other birds - some who apparently are pets along with you, and some wild birds you meet on the way. They'll give you various extra tasks to complete aside from the main "missions". Their dialog is amusing, and I actually laughed out loud reading one late-game exchange.
And I needed that laugh. It's about the only reason I gave this game 2.5 stars instead of 1. The purity of your "quest" as a pet trying to help its owner, the cast of characters, and their dialog with you and each other save this game from its own abomination.
And that abomination is just absolutely atrocious controls. There's a metric crapton of tricks you can perform, and that means overloading the buttons on the controller quite a bit. This, in turn, means that the controls are inconsistent at best. Trying to grind a rail at a tight angle? You're more like to stall or blunt than do what you're trying. Trying to slowly take a turn? Something will spontaneously cause you to pick up a shitton of speed and launch yourself over or through some obstacle that will take 20 seconds of your limited mission time to recover from.
Controlling this damned bird is just awful. The game's default control scheme inverts every axis imaginable. Press
? The camera will pan down. Press
? I can't even remember what dumb thing happens. Press
? You'll go right. For reasons. I really can't explain why this last one is the case, because it's just asinine. You can fix all of this, of course, in the game's settings. But you
have to fix it to make the controls make any sense. Especially if you're coming off a first-person shooter. The panning and movement controls will just... ugh... Suck.
And then there's the camera itself. If you do ever play this game, try really, really hard not to use
while moving. The second you move the bird, the camera will whip back around - which happens A LOT by itself when in half pipes - and will disorient and nauseate you. At least, it did for me. I spent the first 2 hours I played the game just fighting the camera before I resigned myself to the fact that I couldn't use it like I do with Halo or Mass Effect games to move orthogonal to the camera and strafe or just look around and find my next target. In SkateBIRD, you can use the camera to look around while stationary, but never, ever touch it while moving around.
Oh, and if you're a completionist please be aware: the people who wrote this made it so you unlock an achievement as soon as you start up. Total dick move. Fortunately, the game is a relatively easy completion. The zones are fairly small, and most missions give you ample time to finish them. The only really hard ones are the missions to rack up score. If you're not playing with the cheats enabled or balancing disabled, the twitchy controls make it so that this is almost undoable.
The cute story here really saves the game. There's not much to the gameplay. But of what there is, it's pretty miserable to play. Not having a good story or dialog to back that up would make this game utterly unplayable.
This isn't the worst game I've ever played. Still, that bar is low and I would not recommend it. At all.
2.5