Consider the Albatross: A Critical Review of ‘SkateBIRD’
Our thanks to Glass Bottom Games for providing an advance review copy of SkateBIRD on Steam.
I have been eagerly following the development of SkateBIRD on Twitter for nearly three years, and it flapped its way towards the top of my Steam wishlist and perched itself there ever since. (Okay, I got my bird puns out of the way; I’ll leave the rest to others.) So when I received an opportunity to review the game ahead of release, I eagerly took the chance to do so. In some respects, I was immediately taken in by certain superficial aspects of SkateBIRD. But after several frustrating and tedious hours that consistently felt more like a chore than genuine fun to play, I am disheartened to report that SkateBIRD is one of the most disappointing games I’ve played this year.
What first drew me to SkateBIRD was the quirkiness of the project: a game where birds perform tricks on skateboards, shredding halfpipes and popping ollies. The concept is a perfect execution of cute and eccentric, whimsical and ridiculous. Readers of Epilogue will know that I will play almost any game, especially an indie, if it features adorable animal protagonists. Couple that soft spot with my childhood nostalgia for skateboarding games like the massively successful Tony Hawk series, and SkateBIRD felt like an instant all-timer once I could get my talons on it.
Create-A-Birb Character Customization
SkateBIRD fully delivers on this idiosyncratic avian premise. The first thing the game presents you with is a character creator called “Create-a-Birb,” an intentional misspelling that perfectly represents the sort of childlike bird personality that the developer, Glass Bottom Games, has curated on Twitter. I was delighted to see a surprisingly vast array of species to choose from: cinnamon green cheek conure, cardinal, rose ringed parakeet, dwarf kingfisher, lilac breasted roller, zebra finch, and a dozen or so more species — most of which I had never heard of. Ultimately, I settled on a burrowing owl, but the amount of species made me feel overwhelmed, revealing to me how much genuine love SkateBIRD‘s developer must have towards birds in general.
Once you pick the species of bird — which you can change at any time in the menu — there are seven options for aesthetic customization: five for the bird, and two for the skateboard. These options expand considerably as you collect out-of-reach objects throughout obscure corners of SkateBIRD’s handful of various levels. There are items that are worn on the head, face, neck, back, and waist of the bird, respectively. I thoroughly enjoyed just playing dress-up with my burrowing owl, and ended up fancying the floral options for the head, round sunglasses for the face, a pastel striped scarf for the neck, and a plump hipsack, before dropping in.
I ended up finding many of the optional items in SkateBIRD, but I seldom found any accessory that caused me to drop everything and equip it. This was particularly true of the skateboards and wheels on offer. Obviously, you spend very little time actually looking at your skateboard in a game like this, as you’re more reading the interactions between your character and the environment, doing little physics calculations in your head. But I stopped playing around with the skateboard whenever I unlocked new items, and would have enjoyed more playful varieties to choose from.
Most of the character customization I returned to was in the “worn on head” category, because there are some genuinely hilarious options in there: devil horns, a “drinking hat,” a cool fez, a punk mohawk, a propeller hat, and so on. Most of these items are available at the start of the game, gradually expanding as optional secret items are accumulated. My favorite optional “worn on head” item that I found was sadly something I’d seen already on Twitter: the Birdie Sanders hair. (There’s a top one-tenth of 1% hoarding 99% of the enjoyment joke in here somewhere.) The only item I swapped out during my playthrough was when I found a ukulele that I could sling across Birb’s back. Even if I found the custom items to be a little undercooked, there’s no doubt that just about anybody can make their chosen bird as cute as they want in SkateBIRD.
A Shredding Soundtrack
The vibe of SkateBIRD is greatly enhanced by a soundtrack that feels like a perfect blend of the Tony Hawk era ska of my childhood and the mid-2010s pop punk that kept me sane on many road trips over my college years. Some of the licensed music in particular provides the precise feeling of picking up an old mixtape or homemade VHS footage in the 90s. My favorite song in this regard is We Are The Union’s “A Better Home,” which is dynamic in its movements between feeling angsty and triumphant. The lyrics to “A Better Home” have encircled my thoughts like buzzards overhead in between my sessions with SkateBIRD and there are a handful of other songs that hit similar high notes.
I was also delighted to see a “Check them out!” button in the music menu which, if you’re enjoying a band like We Are The Union’s music, you can open up their website and follow more of their projects. I’m so incredibly glad that I used this feature to check out We Are The Union’s website, because I soon realized that their most recent concept album is about the singer exploring her newfound identity as a trans woman, something I sorely needed since I publicly came out last year.
On the other hand, not every song in SkateBIRD hits as deeply. At some point towards the end of SkateBIRD, I found myself exercising the surprising amount of control that the game gives you over the soundtrack and removing a few tracks from my playlist. Luckily, I found the less remarkable songs to be the exception as I flapped around the halfpipes, contemplating the lyrics of some expertly curated tracks.
SkateBIRD also has its own instrumental OST that carries all the right vibes at various story moments, setting the atmosphere for silly quests like a “heist.” Nathan Scott Madsen’s SkateBIRD OST would be best described as tone-setting, and in that regard, it wholeheartedly succeeds. Most of the music is somewhere in the lo-fi adjacent realm, which is going to be great when I want something familiar to listen to during a future writing or reading session.
Inconsistent Writing in SkateBIRD
SkateBIRD is ostensibly about doing your best, and that ideal is born out through the writing more than anything else. Your playable character, called Birb, interacts with a number of other bird companions throughout the story. Practically all of these companions have quippy lines that commonly involve bird puns, which is basically what I was hoping for given how the game marketed itself on Twitter for years. For the most part, SkateBIRD’s writing is strong enough to warrant the story. Oftentimes, however, the playful spirit of the writing becomes annoyingly adolescent.
I found this annoyance with the writing crop up in characters who reminded me of my middle school self who thought being “random” was a personality trait. SUDDENLY SPEAKING IN ALL CAPS, or breaking grammatical conventions to sound excite, etc. all sort of compiled into a tone that feels aimed down at kids — steeped in meme culture. And that wouldn’t be an innately bad thing to think of SkateBIRD as a kid’s game. But there’s a line between sounding childish and being kid-friendly, and SkateBIRD too often felt like the former during my experience with it.
To give the game its due, there are some genuinely funny instances of writing throughout SkateBIRD, and they most commonly happened through the anti-capitalist plotline involving an infiltration and overthrow of bosses and their corporations. One of my favorite side characters in this regard was Sam King, a blatant nod at Sam Fisher from the Splinter Cell series, who schemes with Birb at varying story intervals. Sam King’s character is consistently written such that lines like “Destroying private property through the power of friendship. Intriguing,” are entirely representative of the themes and tones that SkateBIRD aims for.
I think it’s the moments of SkateBIRD’s intellectualism that stuck with me the most, as evidenced by the fact that I took screenshots of lines like “You offended me, you offended the stock market–you offended the concept of money,” and “Everyone needs money! If you don’t need money – why, that’s when you need it more than ever!” Even SkateBIRD’s aforementioned soundtrack, if you listen to the lyrics, feel like a clenched fist aimed at corporate overlords and landlords alike. I vibe with these ideas as a contrasting point to the “comfy” aesthetic that SkateBIRD’s creator so desperately wants to shrug off, and I truly wish that the writing leaned less towards “liking snacks is a punchline” and more towards birds critiquing oligarchic, fascistic corporatocracy.
A Fledgling Skateboarding Experience
Perhaps I am responsible for creating a Platonic ideal of SkateBIRD in my head, but I found the moment-to-moment experience of playing SkateBIRD to be exhausting and tedious. Controlling Birb never felt natural on my controller, even if the actual control mapping was relatively familiar to anyone who has played a skateboarding game in the past decade. Moving through the game’s environments felt both aimless and frustrating, which is partially due to the very few authentically skatepark-feeling environments, and instead a haphazard conglomeration of corporate office supplies and industrial rooftops. And the actual mission structure of each skateboarding task feels like uninspired busywork that’s supposed to sell you through SkateBIRD’s internet culture-drenched writing.
The actual mechanics of SkateBIRD are simple enough to anyone who is used to the skateboarding genre of video games. The face buttons map onto ollie, flip, grind, and grab tricks respectively. You use the environment to gather momentum and pull off sick combos. As with classic skateboarding games, you go through the motions of collecting the SKATE letters, racking up tens of thousands of points and combos, etc., all within a time limit. The only “new” feature that SkateBIRD brings to the table, mechanically speaking, is the addition of flapping once in mid-air after you have ollied.
SkateBIRD is surprisingly sparse in what it has to offer in terms of player control. Grasping the fundamentals is simple enough, but I soon realized that I couldn’t tweak my tricks whatsoever. Skateboarding games have primed me to expect an ability to alter a trick mid-grind or mid-manual, and even during lip tricks. The fact that changing trick positions requires you to jump and land again is a limiting disappointment that became especially glaring in some late-game stages where SkateBIRD’s characters ask you to rack up over 200,000 points in a relatively flat environment in just two or three minutes. I was willing to forgive the relatively meager options for tricks in SkateBIRD until it gated its story behind the arbitrary timed point-collector missions.
Unclear and Inefficient Level Design
My frustration with the limited and constraining moveset in SkateBIRD is where I finally lost my good will towards the level design. Early in SkateBIRD, I found myself getting used to open environments where I had no clear objective to speak of. I simply had to skate around aimlessly until I found an idle bird ready to distribute the next mission to me. I think it’s an incredible mistake to leave the birds lurking and visually unremarkable in the large, often multi-tiered environments. I never got frustrated trying to find the quest-giving birds, but I often became bored while circling around to do so. Sometimes this boredom was punctuated by excitement when I saw the next bird I’d need to speak with, only to literally scream as I rolled past them. (Yes, there’s a “screm” button, and it’s the same button as talking to the birds.) These birds didn’t, in fact, have a quest to give. At least put some bird seed in front of them so I can identify the birds who are just hanging out versus the ones I need to interact with to progress.
Even if the NPC birds were made visually obvious, like the bird-compass does during certain collect-a-thon missions, the levels in SkateBIRD are bland and unremarkable. Only the birds are colorful and visually pleasing. Everything else feels, perhaps appropriately given the nature of where the story takes place, drab and soulless. There are some smile-inducing magazines-as-halfpipes and paperclip-chains-as-grind-rails touches, but they are infrequent enough as to be drowned out by greys and tans for most of the experience.
Navigating environments that have little to visually distinguish them built into the aforementioned tedium I mentioned, where I was frustrated with simple acts like building up the “FANCY” meter for my bird to gain enough speed and verticality at various missions. It felt like an absolute chore to skate around these environments because I never had enough base momentum to go anywhere. I had to circle around on a few halfpipes and do a handful of basic tricks to build enough FANCY to transfer to a rooftop or grind quickly enough to reach a hidden item, etc. Just as commonly, I found myself in an endless reset-loop where I’d miss my jump somehow or simply bail around an unexpected corner, losing precious time or progress. This happened so often each play session that I continually had the compelling thought that I wish I could hop off my skateboard and just run/flap around for a minute to let off some steam.
I’m happy to take the blame for being somewhat unskilled at the skateboarding controls themselves, but I also can’t help but compare the jankiness of basic movement in SkateBIRD with the fluid mechanics of another 2021 indie centered on skateboarding: The Ramp. While The Ramp has no story to speak of, it introduces a strange but welcome mechanic involving button presses and gravity. Thus, the entire point of The Ramp is to glide around various mini-sessions and perfect the possible mechanics, which led me to earning the “Lord of the Board” achievement in my first afternoon with the game. SkateBIRD, on the other hand, probably spread itself too thin on the development front, and I never felt like I could grasp the mechanics in a meaningful way that established both a skill floor and ceiling. Especially considering the FANCY mechanic, I never felt like the basic skateboarding was as smoothly integrated into the environments as it could have been.
Gap Transfer: Expectations and Reality
Even if the momentum system of FANCY was overhauled, there would still be the consistent issue of clipping around the environment and watching my bird bail off their board, flapping around and screeching — the only true moment of solidarity I ever felt for my character. (Me too, little birb, me too.) The rooftop level is probably the biggest offender in this regard, as there are a number of ramps that I’d regularly collide with, expecting for my full FANCY meter to launch me over and gather the floating item I’d want, only to infuriatingly watch my bird faceplant as if the wood of the skateboard had hit the ramp instead of the wheels. I’d jump to grind on a cable leading up to a blowtorch and watch my bird inexplicably change angles right when I jumped, flopping helplessly into the fog below.
The sheer amount of times my expectations failed to align with what the game had previously taught me to expect from its environments was astounding. I’d angle my board to grind and suddenly be locked into place in a stall, or my board was ever-so-slightly imperfect from being perpendicular with the bottom of a halfpipe, and so on. These issues were persistent in every environment, but never more so than the vertical steam jump once you’ve infiltrated the AC system towards the end of SkateBIRD. In order to ascend vertically, you have to time your double jump perfectly; in my experience, there was a 95% chance of hitting the ceiling on the way up, and if I miraculously didn’t hit the ceiling, I’d boost up only to have no lateral momentum, agonizingly watching my bird fall back down to the ground below. Basic problems like this are why I could never play SkateBIRD for more than one level before getting too frustrated and moving onto something else.
Fun is not the value by which I measure games, but fun is certainly towards the top of the list of important gameplay feelings a skateboarding game should have, in my opinion. By virtue of its design, SkateBIRD never once felt fun to me. And I am gutted to say something that condemnatory, all things considered.
Reflecting on How SkateBIRD Fits Into 2021 Releases
In a year that many are describing as barren for video game releases, SkateBIRD felt like one of the easy wins of 2021 for me. When it wasn’t, I felt awful. Not only did I want to love this game, I had every reason to love this game. From the moment I saw my first Birb GIF on Twitter to the time I eagerly installed the demo which I enjoyed, to the excitement I felt when I learned that I would be reviewing it prior to release, SkateBIRD has created positive emotions in my mind. But with the final game in my hands, for several days in a row, I would play for about an hour before the problems I’ve described bummed me out. I’d close the game. And here we are.
The last thing I want to do in a review like this is punch down towards a hard-working indie developer whose work I have followed and admired for many years now. Megan Fox, creator of SkateBIRD, has earned my respect on many important occasions, whether that’s offering industry transparency or showing solidarity for many of the causes that matter to me. I may have a number of personal grievances with SkateBIRD as it leaves the nest, but I want to emphasize that I appreciate the love and craft that went into producing this game. And if I’ve learned anything in my several years as a games critic, it’s that making video games is hard. When SkateBIRD frustrated me, I imagined what it felt like to actually make it, and that abstract idea somehow kept me on board until the end.
So if you were merely on the fence about SkateBIRD, I’d sadly have to caution you against this experience. But if the idea of skateboarding around as a bird sounds cheeky and unique, as I felt it did, and you’re looking for something new and charming, then maybe SkateBIRD will be for you. If you’re looking for some cute birds, character customization, a ripping soundtrack, and a game that you can pick up casually for little bursts of time, then I think SkateBIRD will achieve just that. This game doesn’t masquerade as some physics simulation for die-hard skateboarding enthusiasts like The Ramp, though I ultimately wish it leaned a little further in that direction. Instead, SkateBIRD is a game that, like its tagline, tries its best.
Regardless of whether SkateBIRD succeeds — which I would like it to, even if it’s not a game that I’d personally recommend — it made an impression on me. Speaking only for myself here, but as a creative person, that’s the usual endstate of my goals: to make an impression. Even if, as in the words of resident skate-bird Rex Heronson, “the wounds of time will eventually turn [all creative works] into dust and ash.”
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