Into Skateboarding? Then You Can’t Miss Mike V Skateboard Party HD!

Posted by Bogdan Lazar

Mike V Skateboard Party HD iPhone Game Review.

Even though summer is past us and skateboarders put down their skateboards and pick up their snowboarding gear, hardcore fans will nevertheless appreciate a good kickflip every now and then. If weather doesn’t allow you to pick up your skateboard and head down to the skate park and you’re stuck inside watching the snow fall, reminiscing about a good old skate trick, then head on to the AppStore and get yourself Mike V Skateboard Party HD. You’ll be doing kickflips, heelfips, airwalks or 50 − 50 grinds in no time!

How to play Mike V Skateboard Party HD

The game is loaded with features, as you will soon discover. But for the purpose of this review, we’ll keep short and sweet. You can choose to play either career mode or free skate. Depending on how far you’ve progressed in career mode, you have already unlocked new skaters, new boards and new locations to practice your tricks.

Unlocking new items will depend on the experience you’ve gained while taking head on the only location that’s available from the start of your career: the Community Center. At each location, you’ll need to complete a set of achievements in order to unlock the next location. The very last location you can purchase via in-app purchase for just 99 cents.

At your first location, you need to reach over 2000 points, grind on the swing set, find hidden objects, the swimming pool and execute a 500 points combo (very hard to do by the way), in order to unlock your next location, which will feature a different set of achievements for you to tackle.

But enough about the intricacies of the off-game part. The most interesting and impressive part of Mike V Skateboard Party HD is the in-game features and the endless possibilities it can offer.

An impressive trick list

A word of warning, the trick list is seriously impressive, with over 40 unique tricks! Of course, you’ll be able to achieve all these tricks via simple key combinations.

You can move and direct your skater on the track via the joystick on your left. The game features both a virtual directional pad and a tilt-based control, but I found the joystick to be much more easier to use, plus I’m a fan of this type of control.

The real beauty though is the controls that you have on the right side of your screen. You basically have four types of tricks: flip tricks, grab tricks, grind tricks and ollie tricks. Pressing any of these in combination with the four directional buttons will have you performing any of the 40 tricks in no time. You can access the list of tricks at any point in the game by pressing the pause button (located up top, next to the timer) and choosing View tricks list.

Some of the tricks are pretty basic and require no additional preparation on your part. You can press the up button and the kickflip button (the shoe-like icon) to do a nollie kickflip, or left and kickflip to do a heelflip. You can do this at any point in the game, while you’re running down the track or just standing.

Some of the tricks however require that you be in the air to perform. These are the grab tricks and will land you more points than the basic tricks. They are also harder to perform, as are the balance tricks that will require you grinding and then performing a trick.

It’s virtually impossible though to remember all the combinations from the first couple of sessions of gameplay, but I guarantee you that once you start playing you won’t be able to put it down and tricks to start to come to you as normal as breathing.

More features that you can think of

You can customize your board, your outfits, your wheels and bearings. You can complete over 25 achievements to unlock basically everything in the game, and you still won’t get bored by it. The graphics look stunning and running the game on an iPhone4S will leave you drooling over how fine everything looks and how smooth the animations are.

The soundtrack is provided by Conditions & Revolution Mother.

Mike V Skateboard Party HD is a truly amazing game, and while I’m not a skateboarder I can appreciate the effort put into this game, the amazing result that the developers have achieved and heck, I might even go and buy myself a board when summer hits us! The game is available as a universal download for the iPhone, iPad and iPod, but it requires you to own a 3GS at the very least and a 3rd generation iPod touch to play it.

Screenshots