If you are at all interested in both the iPhone and skateboarding you know about Touchgrind
. You’ve probably seen the trailer for it at least a couple of times, just like I have. But, you may be skeptical as to how good the game is, I was too.
The game currently costs $4.99 and allows you to skate around a skate park doing tricks on rails, ramps, and boxes. The interface for the game feels surprisingly good, you place two fingers on the board and slide, flick, and remove your fingers from the screen to do various tricks.
For the first 10 minutes of playing this game I had no idea how to do any tricks. Being the occasional gamer that I am and former hardcore gamer I thought I would be able to figure it out pretty quick on my own, but I quickly realized that it was a little more difficult than the trailer made it seem.
The game does feature some really well done tutorials, you are basically just watching a video of how to do things while an explanation is written across the bottom of the screen but it gives you enough information to be able to do it yourself when you go into a Warm Up or Jam Session.
I’m not going to explain how to do all the tricks here but know that it was only a matter of about 20 minutes before I was doing tricks with ease.
The game features 3 play modes, Warm Up, Jam Session, and Competition. In Warm Up you are basically allowed to roam around the skate park doing tricks with no time limits or goals of any kind. Jam Session let’s you do the same but in this one you are challenged to beat your best trick (my current is 89,396). Competition gives you a time limit of 100 seconds to get the highest score you can, with those higher scores you unlock new boards you can skate with.
There is only one skate park, which is a little disappointing, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason they wouldn’t add new ones in later updates. But the park that is in the game does have all of the obstacles to make sure you have a good time skating in it.
Another problem I’ve had with the game is that there isn’t a large distance between the front of the board and the edge of the screen, so you end up having to judge when to ollie on to something based on the indicators on the screen, but it is very difficult to judge when or for how long to turn so you are positioned just right going towards the obstacle and it is hard to know how close you are to it. They have tried to help with some of those problems by letting you tap the magnifying glass button at the bottom right hand corner of the screen to give you a birds eye view of the park but you find yourself going between those two view modes and eventually getting frustrated. And, you can’t skate while in the birds eye view mode.
The game is great and it does have enough depth to justify its $4.99 price tag, but hopefully with later updates they will fix the couple of problems I did have with it. If you are at all interested in skateboarding or skate games I think this would be a great buy.