Goon Squad gets the levels right, gets the music very right, and then fumbles the one thing an arcade skater cannot afford to fumble.
Muscle memory doesn’t lie
I have one test for an arcade skateboarding game and it’s over almost before the clock starts. Boot it, skip whatever tutorial is offered, ollie off the first thing I see, land, and immediately revert into a manual. My thumbs learned that sequence on a PlayStation a very long time ago and they have never let go of it. If the game accepts the input, everything else is a conversation. If it doesn’t, the level design can be inspired and it still won’t matter, because this entire genre rests on one promise: that your hands and the game agree about what just happened.
Skatesterre doesn’t accept the input. Not on the Factory, and not on the six stages that follow it. I finished the career and then went back through every level in Free Skate to give it the benefit of the doubt, and the answer never changed. There is real craft in this thing. The maps are smart, the art direction is charming, and the soundtrack is the best I’ve heard in a skating game in years. None of that survives contact with the skating itself, and the skating is the job.
What Goon Squad actually built
This is a small, deliberate throwback, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. Released on August 13, 2026 across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2, developed by the German studio Goon Squad and published by Headup, Skatesterre is chasing the pre-simulation era of the genre: two minutes on a clock, a list of objectives per stage, a scrolling multiplier in the corner, and no interest whatsoever in whether any of it resembles actual skateboarding.
You ride as Sterre Meijer, the Dutch skater and content creator known online as Surfsterre, and she is the only playable character. The main menu offers four things: Career, Single Session, Free Skate, and Customize. Career gates the stages behind objectives. Single Session and Free Skate give you the maps once you’ve opened them, one with the clock and one without. Customize handles her outfit and her board.
The download is 1.3GB, which tells you most of what you need to know about the scope. It’s single player only, on one system, with Save Data Cloud as the sole Nintendo Switch Online feature attached. The Switch 2 release is English only, with no Portuguese option, and it carries a PEGI 16 rating for strong language, which comes almost entirely from the lyrics rather than anything on screen.
The skating, which is the whole job
The control layout is close enough to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that I never once looked at a button prompt. That’s a compliment to the copying and a problem for the copy, because it means the muscle memory arrives fully formed and then spends the whole career being contradicted.
Reverting out of a landing into a manual, the move that makes a two-minute run into a single unbroken combo, does not chain the way the animation promises. Sometimes it takes. Sometimes the game decides you’ve landed and stood up, and the multiplier evaporates. The manual balance meter starts each attempt already leaning toward a bail rather than centered, so instead of correcting a wobble you’re fighting a fall from the first frame. Ollie height is inconsistent enough that I regularly sailed clean over the rail I was aiming at, which in a game about precise lines is not a small thing.
Then there’s the jank, and there is a lot of it. Grinds that spit you sideways across the map for no reason. Geometry that grabs you and won’t let go, including a pipe on the Factory that will hold a grind indefinitely if you find the right spot. Floors you can drop through into nothing. A clock that hits zero and sometimes just lets you keep skating. When you bail, Sterre doesn’t fall and get up; she blinks out of existence and reappears, which is presumably a deliberate effect and reads as a bug every single time.
Goon Squad also stripped out pieces of the formula it’s copying without replacing them. There’s no special gauge, so no bank of showpiece tricks to build toward and cash in at the end of a run. There are no stat pickups, because Sterre arrives fully capable, which removes the progression curve that made the old career modes feel like they were going somewhere. And if you come to a complete stop, you can’t simply push off again; you have to hold the ollie button to get rolling. That last one is a genuinely strange decision, and it’s the kind of friction you feel every single time a run stalls out.
The two-minute clock is lifted wholesale, and it exposes everything else. A short timer only works when the run is dense, when you can commit to a route on the assumption that the game will hold up its end. Here the clock mostly measures how many times you were interrupted. I lost more runs to the game than to the timer, and after a while I stopped planning lines at all and started skating defensively, taking the safe grind instead of the interesting one, which is the exact opposite of what a stage like the Mall is built to encourage.
I want to be precise about what’s wrong here, because “it feels bad” is lazy criticism. It isn’t that the physics are unrealistic. Arcade skaters are supposed to be unrealistic. It’s that they’re inconsistent, and inconsistency in a score-attack game is fatal. When a combo drops in a good one, you know exactly which input you botched. When a combo drops here, you shrug.
Sterre Meijer is barely in her own game
The most interesting thing about this project is the name on the box, and the game does close to nothing with it. Meijer isn’t a legacy pro being wheeled out for a nostalgia play. She’s a contemporary figure whose whole presentation, the bright colors, the clean style, the fashion, the video-first career, is the opposite of the spray-paint-and-sneering aesthetic that arcade skating games have been recycling since 2001.
So the honest question is what a game built around her should look like, and Skatesterre never asks it. Her presence amounts to a set of clothing items in a scrolling menu, a handful of which are modeled on outfits from her videos, most of which are recolors of the same few pieces. There’s no voice, no cutscene, no text, no framing device, nothing that would tell a player who has never heard of her why she’s here. You could swap in a generic created character and lose nothing except the title.
That’s the missed opportunity, and it’s bigger than the bugs, because the bugs are fixable. A skating game led by an athlete whose actual cultural weight sits in fashion and video and internet presence could have looked like nothing else on the eShop. This one looks like a 2001 pastiche with a modern face pasted on the front.
Seven levels, and this is where it gets good
Credit where it’s owed. The seven stages, Factory, Spillway, Mall, Skyscraper, Waterpark, Island, and Arena, are the best-designed part of the game by a wide margin, and I’d argue they’re better than the game deserves.
The Factory does the classic industrial thing properly: steel pipes at the right heights, long concrete runs, rails that line up with the ramps feeding into them. The Mall stacks its floors so that a clean line down through the tiers actually reads as a plan rather than a happy accident, and it hides enough alternate routes that I was still finding new drops in there after I’d finished with it. The Waterpark is the loudest and most chaotic of the set, and it gives you just enough clearance between obstacles to keep speed through the middle of it. The Arena is the one that most obviously wants you to memorize a single perfect circuit.
Every map is built around flow, secondary paths, and lines that keep a combo alive if you plan for them. Somebody on this team understands exactly what makes a skate level worth replaying. The tragedy is that executing those lines depends on a control system that won’t cooperate, so the maps keep writing checks the skating can’t cash.
How it runs on Switch 2
Fine, and that’s a genuine point in its favor. Nothing in Skatesterre is asking anything of this hardware, and the frame rate holds steady docked and in handheld with no stutter and no hitching when a stage loads in. The only faults I hit were the physics ones described above, and those follow you onto every platform. A 1.3GB arcade skater running clean on a Switch 2 is the least surprising sentence in this review.
The look is a modernized PlayStation-era pastiche, slightly rough on purpose, bright and readable, with enough variety between the seven environments that they never blur together. It suits handheld play better than docked, where the simplicity of the surfaces is more obvious on a big screen.
The PC build shipped Steam Deck Verified on day one, which is a useful signal about where the ambition sits. This was designed from the start to run on modest portable silicon, and the Switch 2 version is the beneficiary. I’d call that efficiency rather than a compromise, and it’s the one area where a small team building small got exactly the result it wanted.
One setting to change before you do anything else: the default camera sits far too close to Sterre, and reading a line more than a few meters ahead is close to impossible with it. There’s an option to pull it back, it should have been the default, and the game is noticeably more playable within seconds of finding it.
The soundtrack is the best thing here
The music is excellent, and I mean that without qualification. Skate punk and skate rock from small acts rather than anything licensed off a major label, and whoever assembled it has a real ear for the register the old games hit. “Leap of Faith” by Charlie Bit My Finger and “Bathroom Graffiti” by Trophy Lungs both do the specific thing a skate track has to do, which is give a run momentum it hasn’t earned yet. Clicking the right stick skips to the next song, a small convenience that I used constantly and that more games should copy.
Sound design carries its weight too. Metal grinds have a satisfying scrape, landings hit with a proper thud, and bailing onto concrete sounds like it hurts. There’s a Spotify playlist of the whole thing, and I’d suggest that most people reading this will get more out of the playlist than the game.
Career mode, and how long this lasts
Progression is generous in a way I appreciated. Each stage hands you a spread of objectives, some of which are score targets and combo targets, and some of which are collection tasks: coins gathered inside a single chain, items scattered around the map, a named trick over a named gap. You don’t need to clear all of them to open the next stage, so a player who can’t hold a six-figure combo can still see all seven maps by leaning on the collection side. Free Skate then lets you rehearse a route without the clock before you take it into Career, which is the right structure and works well.
It doesn’t last long. The career is over well before the novelty is, and once the stages are open there’s no online component of any kind and no second character to bring you back. What’s left is the same loop of chasing a personal best against yourself.
At $14.99 that’s a defensible ask, and it’s the strongest argument the game has. This isn’t a $50 release padding itself out. It’s a cheap, short, focused thing that knows what it wants to be. The English-only interface is worth flagging for Portuguese readers, though the menus are simple enough that it barely registers as a barrier.
Verdict
Skatesterre is a good arcade skating game trapped inside a bad one. The maps, the music, the pacing of the career, and the sheer lack of pretension all point at something worth owning. The skating underneath it is unreliable in exactly the way this genre can’t survive, and no amount of goodwill about the levels changes what happens when a revert doesn’t take for the fifth time in a run. There’s a version of this game, after a couple of serious patches to the physics and the balance meter, that I’d rate two points higher. That version isn’t on the eShop today.
Buy it if you want a cheap, short throwback to shred through on a train and you’re the forgiving type, or if the soundtrack alone is worth $14.99 to you, which is a more reasonable position than it sounds. Skip it if you’ve ever cared about landing a clean line, because this will only remind you how good the games it’s imitating actually were. And if you’re here for Sterre Meijer, wait for someone to make the game she deserves.
