They'll ask you to noseplant on quarter pipes to clean up soda cups, or roll around attaching balloons to a blanket to open up a new area. Your fellow birds are scattered around each level. Just press a button to get back up, or you can slap down a 'reset' point anywhere, then warp back there with a button touch. You are tiny after all, and skating amid the pizza boxes or grinding the cereal bowls of your unseen human companion can result in a nasty fall. It gets you some extra air, nothing too outrageous, but it comes in handy if you need to leap over a discarded sock. This is basically a double-jump, a little flap-flap after you've already hopped. There are flips, grabs, plants, grinds, mid-air ollies. On an Xbox controller (you should use one) you hold down A and release to perform an ollie, then tap other buttons and the left thumbstick to perform a trick. With that tone firmly established, you get to doing ollies and flip tricks in a somewhat recognisable way.

Even a trailer announcing the game's delayed release date couldn't help itself. Instead, this is about being a pigeon on a piece of plywood, collecting letters to the word M O N E Y because an investment banker cockatoo said it's important. We have Session and Skater XL for our kickflip realism. There are a bunch of canaries, eagles, gulls and budgies who give you missions and tasks to perform, and they are not serious birds. Still, it's hard to hate on these feathery ones when they squawk so pure, and when their taste in music is im-peck-able.ĭidn't like that bird joke? Well, maybe this game isn't for you. There's plenty of wobbly physics on show here, much of it intentional and jokey (as you'd expect from a game that seems to have resulted entirely from a single pun). But don't expect the truly smooth flow of the Hawkster's outings. It's the arcadey kind of kickflipper, handling more like THUG than a Skate game. Skatebird is simultaneously a homage to the Tony Hawk games of old and a celebration of just how stupid birds can be. A sometimes wonky skating game that makes up for its jank with birbish moxie.

Skatebird early access