But this roadblock was simply impossible for me to overcome. In my opinion, story modes are the ideal way to teach a player the main mechanics, which they then can apply to a score attack or even multiplayer mode. It’s a restriction that feels like it exists purely to recreate that feeling of the Tony Hawk series, rather than thinking about what a new player would want. Now I understand that this is leftover from the arcade-like approach to games such as Tony Hawk and Crazy Taxi, but doing this with a story mode, having a mere three minutes at a time to familiarize myself with the controls, was absolutely awful. There’s only three minutes for you to complete your goals and if you fail, you have to restart the entire level. The core issue here is that these story-requests are tied to the same timer as the regular objectives in the game. You can interact with a character on the map and get an additional goal to perform.
Surprisingly, there’s also a story mode on offer, too. In the singleplayer campaign, you try and complete objectives like scoring a certain number of points, collecting all the B-R-E-A-K letters, and stringing combos together: pretty standard stuff for a skateboarding game. Only later, when in freemode, did I find a way to play on a different map, and I finally managed to grasp some of the more precise movements, but even then, screwing up was a consistent part of the experience. It doesn’t help that the general tutorial and first stage are awful at teaching you the game. I got stuck in the ramps for half a minute before being able to make my way out. I kept spinning out, being unable to dictate precisely where I wanted to steer towards. This makes controlling the boat itself incredibly difficult. You don’t move the stick in combination with where you want to go, but instead accelerate your boat and immediately get off to an insanely high top speed.
On top of a skateboard, you actively control the movement of the skateboard via the character in Wave Break, the game controls like Mario Kart. I’ll admit, it’s been years since I’ve played a skateboarding game, but even so Wave Break immediately felt wrong. There’s barely any time to get used to its weird mechanics. But from the word go, something just felt incredibly off about Wave Break. On paper, this setup sounds like a great twist on the Tony Hawk-style skateboarding gameplay.
Perform enough tricks and you build up a meter that enables you to slow down time for a short period and unload your clip onto opponents. Meanwhile, you are also playing against other players and are able to take them out by shooting them with your gun. Wave Break is touted by the developers as a Skateboating game, where you perform tricks, jumps, stunts, grinds, and twists to score points and complete objectives. Now to be fair, I probably should have done a little bit more digging before I decided to jump on board. Unfortunately, the only thing that broke by the end was me. So I fired up the engine, stepped into my boat, and sailed straight off into Wave Break. My curiosity was peaked, especially when flashes of gunfights on boats were also shown. During a performance from the band Weezer, this weird ‘90s neon colored Wave Race-like game popped up in the background. Honestly, Wave Break wasn’t really on my radar until last week’s Summer Games Fest.
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