PixlBit

If you were to assume Crayola Scoot is a shovelware title not even worth a look, I wouldn’t blame you. But in this particular instance, you’d be mistaken. As it turns out, it’s a well done extreme sports title in the vein of Tony Hawk or Skate, with a hefty dose of Splatoon influence as well. With depth, variety, and a sizeable number of challenges, there’s plenty on offer in Crayola Scoot to bring in those that have been pining for a new skateboarding experience (though I’ll admit using a scooter is much less cool).

Based across twelve parks in three main locales, Crayola Scoot offers up myriad events in each to test your skill and slowly build your capabilities in the game. It’s a bit slow going at first in terms of acclimating to the game’s controls. I was never one for the Skate games, so I never got accustomed to doing tricks using the right control stick, which is how you’ll have to engage here. After a few hours it started to become more natural, but I’ll admit I still pine for the familiar Tony Hawk controls given my many hours invested there. The only reasonable complaint I can offer is that doing jumps using the right stick is a bit awkward and would’ve been more accessible if mapped to a button.

Once you find a comfort zone with the controls, things start to flow well. The events have a nice variety to them and the color splat aspect of the game works well in adding a new facet to this type of experience. The events are split between both single and team and each event has three challenge levels, which just ramps up the CPU AI.

Some events require earning the highest score, others grabbing the most crayons, there’s a game of tag, as well as a splat challenge, which involves covering as much of the park as possible with paint. Landing tricks will splat a ton of paint everywhere around you. Grinding and even boosting will evict small amounts of paint from your scooter, helping coverage. Aiding the battle are geysers that are activated when you cover enough of them with paint. It turns out that it's fun to play a Splatoon-like game, especially in team events, using scooter tricks instead of spray guns and rollers.

As you complete events, you’ll earn experience and upon leveling up you’ll do a head-to-head challenge of SCOOT, which is basically HORSE. One person does a trick combo, sets a certain score and you need to best it. You’ll keep going until one of you fail to best the other's score and the loser will earn a letter. The first to earn all the letters of SCOOT loses.

These particular challenges really helped me understand how to maximize scores by executing combos. Unlike Tony Hawk, there are no reverts to link tricks in half pipes and along rails. Instead, you’ll need to boost between tricks, but the boost meter is limited. It can be filled by riding over your own colored paint, putting further use to the paint mechanic. It’s a nice little twist to the revert formula established in Tony Hawk that forces you to learn some new strategy to really score big.

As with all games of this nature, the joy is mastering the mechanics, pulling off huge combos and ripping through events. There are a few missteps though. For one, the music, which is always a draw for these games, is totally lacking. Secondly, bailing on tricks is awkward in its implementation. Instead of just getting up and continuing on, the screen wipes and comes back with you back on your scooter. It breaks you out of the experience and makes it a little disorienting when you get rolling again.

The only other problem is that there’s not a ton of variety in the twelve parks and they all kind of blend together. There’s nothing as memorable or as out there as your typical Tony Hawk levels and they don’t have anything hidden to discover that makes them a bit more fun.

Since it seems we're not getting any new Tony Hawk or Skate games any time soon, Crayola Scoot just might be the best way to scratch that itch. With the addition of the Splatoon influence, it's a unique and fun offering that is worth checking out if you're a fan of the extreme sports titles of generations past.