It's funny the difference a year makes. Twelve months and Skate 3 has dropped its predecessor’s clichéd “ride or die, stick it to The Man” pretensions.

Where in the previous you assumed the role of a lone skater that was, like, trying to save his hometown from an evil corporation, and stuff, Skate 3 sees you trading in your scuffed-up jeans for a pair of pinstripes (figuratively speaking) as you launch and pimp your own skateboarding brand. Your new goal is to recruit a pro-skating crew and sell one million skateboards.

In keeping with the sudden shuvit-kick flip from anti-establishment to corporate charter, the skateboarding Mecca of Port Caverton is littered with advertising and brand placements. At least they’re topical and in many ways they breathe some small life into what is otherwise a plastic setting, but the Miracle Whip “Whipfest” and others like it are sure to leave you ponderous.

You’ll also get in on the action yourself (when you can find some spare wall), slapping up your own posters and stickers imploring your fans to part with their pocket money to line yours.

As you might expect, the city of Port Caverton is divided into a series of locations – a university campus, a downtown area, docks, numerous skate parks, and so on – each with its own kind of character.

At these locations you’ll be tasked with challenges that you must complete in order to hawk more of your wares on an adoring public.

Each challenge has two benchmarks for completion: “owning” the challenge and “killing” it. The two levels of completion are a welcome addition to the Skate franchise. Not only does each challenge have its own preset difficulty, a merely competent performance will suffice to sell some decks and advance you through the game. You can come back at any time to kill it and peddle the extra boards.

There are also a number interesting and distracting challenges, such as skating for a magazine cover photo-shoot. The “Hall of Meat” bail challenges also return. The more dislocations and rail-induced vasectomies you can pull off, the better.

You can jump to these locations around the map via the in-game menu, or skate there manually and take in Port Caverton. Unfortunately, Skate 3 doesn’t do enough to encourage the latter. The “Own the Lot” feature does go some small way to helping. Much like the original Skate’s “Own the Spot” system, you’ll wrestle the bragging rights to certain destinations by performing the necessary tricks on the necessary terrain.

Since you’ve gone pro, you’ll no longer be chased off by security guards when you interfere with their jurisdiction as you were in Skate 2. Instead, the citizens of Port Caverton will be your only significant hurdle, as their vacant AI sees them flee in unpredictable and unlikely directions that will usually have you trying to swerve frantically at the last moment.

Moreover, your own crew are often your worst enemy, hindering your progress through the game. In the new team-based events, whether your crew members put in a quality performance or whether they make Telefrag’s poor efforts look halfway decent appears to be a matter of chance.

Speaking of which, almost any controller schematic would be better than RIDE’s curious peripheral and it’s pleasant to know you can play a skateboarding game without wondering what the neighbours might be thinking, but if anything, Skate 3 tries to pack too many moves into the limited buttons available.

The difference between an ollie and a kick flip, for example, is very fine. Both require you to hold down on the right analogue stick before flicking it up – directly up for ollie, up and just a brush to the side for a kick flip. It feels like each degree on the stick correlates to another move and in the adrenaline of the bowl finding the precision required can be difficult.

Take the game online and things become more interesting. Team up with friends and create your own crew (read: clan; read: guild) to compete against others in the same variety of events and challenges available in singleplayer.

Skate 3 includes its own “track” editor, allowing you to build courses from a variety of themes including street, stadium and skate park. It’s fairly basic to use and your tracks can be updated with unlockable items earned elsewhere in the game.

Social hub features allow you to track how your friends are progressing, keeping abreast of their latest magazine covers and uploaded skate parks.

Together these features make Skate 3 a robust instalment in the series and without a doubt, the best skating game currently on shelves. But whether there’s enough here to draw in new audiences is another matter. And to be fair, after the lousy effort that was Tony Hawk RIDE, EA simply had to show up at the park with something more street credible than a banana board (or plastic deck) to be crowned current king of the half-pipe.