Steam's Big New Free Game Has Landed, and Reviews Are Seriously Mixed

After a very long hiatus, the Skate franchise is back but the brand-new entry in the beloved skateboarding series is proving divisive for players.

The Skate franchise (sometimes referred to as skate.) kicked off way back in 2007 and was followed with two further entries before the Electronic Arts published series went on an indefinite hiatus.

However, the wait is now over after developer Full Circle announced that it would be teaming up with EA to bring us, well, Skate, the fourth instalment in the skateboarding video game series.

In the sandbox-style multiplayer experience, players would head to the new city of San Vansterdam and in even better news, the game would be free to play.

Now 2025’s Skate has finally been released in early access and fans both old and new are flocking to the multiplayer sports game to see if the game has managed to capture the magic of the originals with the graphical improvements of a modern-day title.

However, it seems as though its launch is going far from smooth.

Perhaps as a result of multiple reports of bugs and glitches which are both hilarious and extremely frustrating, Skate has found itself gaining mixed reviews online and even currently sits at a ‘mixed’ rating on Steam at the time of writing.

Of course, 2025’s Skate has the benefit of still being in its early access phase but it seems as though players are pretty unhappy with the product that has been released.

On the first day of its launch, Skate reached 80k concurrent players and as you can imagine, this made the servers struggle with many PC users unable to get into the game for at least a few hours.

Additionally, Skate will be testing out the tried, and often failed method, of being a live-service title meaning that microtransactions will be an unwanted part of gameplay.

As a result, one player has dubbed the game “soulless” over on Steam.

The game has locked customisation behind paywalls and there are none of the features that original fans of the series have expected such as a story mode, Hall of Meat or S.K.A.T.E. missions.

Not only that but due to Skate being a live-service game, it does not feature an offline mode so unless you have access to a constant internet connection, you will not be able to play the game at all.

Overall, it seems as though 2025’s Skate has quite a few teething problems which Full Circle and EA need to address.

“It's almost like they didn't listen to the fans,” one Steam user asked in their negative review.

“Skate 3 only took two years to make and was an absolute masterpiece while this game took 5 years and running.

Also, this game lacks the option to play it offline.

Instead of it being F2P with microtransactions, battlepasses and lootboxes, I would have rather paid for a fully finished Skate game. Give us a Skate trilogy remaster with all of the past games instead.”