The original Skate was a complete breath of fresh air for the skateboarding video game genre. It strayed away from the typical Tony Hawk formula that gamers had been used to and delivered a more realistic feeling game by completely changing the way the trick system works. But that’s not to say Skate was a perfect game. While the trick system was good overall, it had some rather noticeable kinks throughout. So when thinking about what you would want out of a Skate sequel, odds are you wouldn’t ask for much more than for them to iron out the kinks in the original game. And this seems like exactly what Skate 2 is trying to do.

The demo starts you out in the character customization screen where you are to choose from a plethora of different appearance options, which is to be expected at this point. After that, it shows a quick video that tells you about how the city has been trying to stop skaters by putting skate blockades on places skaters had been grinding as well as putting more security guards on the streets to help police skaters. Then you’re thrown into the actual demo which serves as mostly a tutorial to help remind you how the trick system works as well as show you some of the tweaks they’ve made to it.

The biggest of the changes made is that you can now hop off of your board and run around much like in the Tony Hawk series. This makes navigating around the world much easier giving you the ability to run up stairs. This was one of my biggest complaints with the first Skate, so it’s nice to see it get fixed. Also, a change that I noticed rather quickly was that it is much easier to perform a manual in Skate 2. In the original Skate, doing a manual was basically worthless because it was way too difficult. In Skate 2, it takes much less skill to do this, which makes stringing together tricks that much easier.

Lastly, when players are running around on foot, they can grab onto certain objects (ramps, dumpsters, etc.) and drag them around. This makes reaching certain spots that would otherwise be impossible to get to a breeze. This feature does worry me a bit, though. The missions in the demo that made me move objects around were more irritating than fun because not only is moving the items around somewhat clunky, but it seems pretty tacked on as well.

Though in the end, it seems like Black Box is making a good amount of meaningful changes to the Skate formula that will make Skate 2 a much more fun game to play. They seem to be playing it pretty safe by sticking to the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” idea, which is good because before they can start making big changes to the series, they need to perfect the system that began it all. Skate 2 is scheduled to hit stores January 21, so you can look for it on shelves then.