Moving home is a big decision for any skater. Apart from the likelihood that your favourite board will get lost, there's also a chance that your dog will end up on the front step of the Sizzling Spaniel Steakhouse in Seoul and that set of boudoir photos you secretly had taken will turn up on the Internet. Since the original PlayStation era, the Tony Hawk games from Activision had no reason whatsoever to up sticks. The House of Hawk sat in splendid isolation atop an ivory vert ramp, only wanting to be disturbed by a game good enough to live in its neighbourhood. Well get ready Birdman, because, not only is skate from EA right outside your front door, it just cut the power and it's about to come in through the window.

The main difference between the two rival skateboarding schools lies in the philosophy department - and specifically their contrasting views on what makes the ultimate control system. The lesson Activision's games taught the world was that an arcade style setup, where tricks are performed by hitting sequences of buttons, allowed players to easily mimic and better the skills of pro skaters. The fact that the controls also sacrificed realism for consumerism didn't seem to be a problem, as long as the demand for the series' multi-million point trick combos continually led to multi-million dollar pay cheques for the publisher - that was until now.

Hawk's huge success easily made him the biggest dog in Dogtown and, with their normal position in the middle of the mass market taken, it was hard to see Electronic Arts as a potential contender in the genre. Thankfully EA saw things differently, and much of skate's appeal is down to its alternative design features, key amongst which are the revolutionary Flickit controls.

The Flickit system centres around the pad's two analog sticks, with the left one controlling your skater's direction and the right one used to perform all the tricks and other skateboarding manoeuvres. Manuals, for example, need the right stick to be delicately held up or down just the right amount to lift the front or back wheels of your board off the ground, while grinding an edge or rail is a precision exercise in timing and positioning. The tricks themselves come in three different levels from basic ones like the classic ollie, which simply requires the right stick to be pushed straight down and then straight up, to advanced ones, where quick dexterity is needed to manipulate the stick in more complex ways, often with the use of a button press or the left stick at the same time. To try and avoid confusion, EA have provided an in-game guide showing how to pull off each of the stunts, and with all of them available right from the very start of proceedings, even as a rookie, your tricktionary has as many entries as Rodney Mullen's.

Even for a videogame, skate is a very tactile experience and, while its controls may not be as immediately comfortable as those of its main rival, after an initial half hour of mild frustration you begin to understand the way their touch and feel accurately recreates the relationship between a skater and his board. As a result, skate is a game that doesn't need to rely on the artificial physics of balance meters or the 'nail the…' system, which is the closest the Tony Hawk games come to realism; and skate is so much more rewarding because of this.

skate's game world is the fictional city of San Vanelona, and the single player story mode begins with the shoot for your new skating video coming to an abrupt end when you accidentally decide to catch one of the town buses with your face. After a trip to the hospital that neatly leads into the limited create-a-character options, you're thrown back onto the streets with only one way to save your reputation - exposure - and not the kind that involves a jury examining pictures of you in minute detail. Your objective is to get onto the front covers of two of skateboarding's premier publications - Thrasher and The Skateboarding Magazine - and achieving this means completing increasingly difficult challenges across the city's four districts (Suburbs, The Res, Down Town and Old Town).

These tasks, which are very often set by pro skaters or characters included in the game, range from downhill events such as Deathrace and Follow Me to trick contests in specific locations. There's even the chance to own a number of top skating spots around San Vanelona, simply by finding them and beating the current highest scores; but by far the most important challenges are the ones that grab you a slice of magazine coverage by getting some of your killer moves down on still or moving film. The story mode provides a substantial test, and one that, along the way, improves both your skills and your skateboarding sixth sense for seeing opportunities to create lines of tricks from the world around you. At the same time, more tangible rewards for progression are available in the form of money and sponsorship deals from companies such as Baker and Plan B, which enable you to customise your clothes and board.

From its humble beginnings, skateboarding has always had a community following and the reason that skate shines online is because it manages to recreate some of this atmosphere. In part this is down to the standard ranked and unranked events and leaderboards, but it's the ability for people to upload and share photos and videos of their greatest moments that delivers the real feeling of community and the chance for legends to be born. Some veterans may justifiably state that skate's replay editor isn't as well constructed as the one in the Tony Hawk's games and, while they would almost certainly be correct, it still comes with more than enough camera angles, filters and other options to make it fit for purpose.

With so much content and the chance for up to four player offline S.K.A.T.E. and Spot Battle party games on one console, it might sound as though EA has made skateboarding more fun than cruising around town on your board whilst hanging onto the back of a pickup truck. The reason that skate doesn't quite achieve this is that some parts of the game are locked in the past - and not even the progressive control system, and EA's other good work, can transport the title all the way back to the future.

Primary amongst these is the imprecise nature of the Flickit system, which frequently sees you making the movement for one trick only for your skater to perform another. It's a problem that's irritating enough during the many story mode challenges where it's basically skate-or-die because one mistake results in failure, but in the tasks that demand the production of a specific trick it can be so infuriating that it leaves your hair standing on end like Rodney Recloose, and your skating abilities looking closer to those of the Spice Girls than the Z-Boys. Then there are some issues that hint at a slight clumsiness in aspects of skate's design, which include the inability to get off your board, a tendency for the game to encourage skaters to get in each other's way and some random in-game load times. The last of these is a real shame as it somewhat undermines the commendable lengths that EA has gone to in trying to make a game as large as skate easily accessible, such as allowing you to use the map to jump straight to the locations of challenges, shops, and train stations around the city. The final gripe concerns the advertising littered throughout the title, as although EA has easily included enough of this to recreate the important part it plays in the culture of the sport, the amount of product placement that skate has been subjected to leaves it branded with the unpleasant marks of a game that has sold out.

On a brighter note, sound has been used well to create spot on board noises and clever effects such as the music that blares out from sound systems at top skate spots to help you locate them, although the menu screens are, as usual, the home of a standard EA mix tape. Visually, skate is once again distinctively alternative, with a camera position that is set fairly close behind your skater, in a slightly dropped down position. The idea is for the whole game to appear like it's being shot by someone following you on another board, and whilst the style is impressive, the angle is not as user-friendly as the one in Tony Hawk's, with your skater often obscuring your view slightly. Despite this, there's still more than enough clear space onscreen to enjoy the sights of the affluent San Vanelona. It's a next generation city that appears to be the perfect gated community for skateboarders, with the perpetual sun that shines down upon it adding a feel of the endless Californian summers of the 1970s, making it look the complete flipside of Proving Ground's urban grime.

There's a strong argument to be made that you can judge the current health of the two main contenders in this new skateboarding battle simply by looking at them. While the veteran Hawk appears tired and jaded from years of struggling to single-handedly carry the genre and keep the huge popularity of his series going, skate, by comparison, is the rookie with none of this burden yet on his back, whose exciting new ideas are helping videogame skateboarding to evolve. It will be interesting to see what EA do next with skate to prove to doubters that it's more than just a lucky fit for a control system they have previously used elsewhere. Perhaps the answer lies in the game's freeskate mode, as it is here, without the hang-ups of time limits and exact trick requirements, where skate feels most at ease - handing over to the player all the inventiveness that EA has put into the city to see what can be created with it and shared with the world. In a funny way it may turn out that the Tony Hawk's games needed the arrival of skate as much as skate needed the existence of Tony Hawk's to make it what it is - the new home of skateboarding, at least for the time being.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).