This week saw something pretty new and novel arrive to early access in the form of Skate, a free-to-play skateboarding sandbox MMO that opens the fictional city of San Vansterdam for players to shred up. A couple of days since its release, it’s safe to say that this one has made headlines that can be termed as good, bad, and extremely amusing.

First, let’s check some data: Developer Full Circle confirmed on Twitter that over 2M players were online at the same time yesterday across PC and console, with over 94K of those players on Steam in its most recent all-time peak this past Thursday night. As one might expect, this amount of strain took its toll on the game servers, but the studio has been cranking out fixes for bugs and stability issues over the past several days.

Despite the surge of concurrency, Steam user reviews are mixed, with some calling the game soulless (or sauceless, which probably means the same thing), expressing disapproval of its live-service design and art style, and disliking its selection of music (one reviewer likened it to canned tunes played in a Forever 21 store).

In spite of the accusations of a lack of sauce, players appear to be managing to have a lot of absolutely goofy fun in the game’s sandbox, if the various clips of movement tech being shared are any indication. Most of these moments involve somersaulting, as players roll around like Samus Aran using the Morph Ball ability, which has evolved to include garbage chute trick shots or combining rolling and belly slides to achieve high speed. Still others have found that using the clap emote will drastically slow your fall speed, making leaps from skyscrapers gentler. All told, this game is very rough around the edges, but hopefully some of this cheesiness will remain intact.

I DID IT!
byu/Batmanbatman17 inSkate4

Clapping slows your descent
byu/SurWesley inSkateEA

Man you don't even know pic.twitter.com/4XIlCEdKx4

— Konto (@KontoLetzPlay) September 16, 2025