Touchgrind Skate 2

Review by eFreeware

Skateboarding games usually hand you a controller and a character and ask you to press buttons in the right order. The appeal of fingerboarding is different: your hand is the skater, and the board answers to how you move rather than to a combo you memorized. That gap is what Touchgrind Skate 2 is built to fill, and it is a gap that few games bother with.

Touchgrind Skate 2 comes from Illusion Labs, a studio whose name is tied to this style of multi-touch finger sports game. It has been on Google Play since December 2015, it is free to download, and it has passed 50 million installs. The average sits at 3.8 from more than 304,000 ratings, which for a skill game of this age is a respectable but not untroubled figure.

Two fingers, one board and a physics engine

The core idea is that your fingers act as the skater's feet. One finger is planted on the tail, another near the nose, and the board reacts through a physics simulation rather than canned animations. A flick of the back finger pops an ollie; a drag across the deck spins it into a kickflip, a heelflip or a pop shuvit. The developer's own framing is that the game takes about ten minutes to understand and a long time to master, and the control scheme is the reason.

That is also where the game asks the most of you. There is no button prompt or timing bar, so the trick either comes out or it does not, and the difference between the two is usually a small change in how your fingers move. The developer lists a deep catalog of maneuvers: powerslides, lip tricks, stalls, drops, and grinds like 5-0s, 50-50s, crooks, tailslides, bluntslides and darkslides. Each can be performed in nollie, fakie or switch, which multiplies the combinations without adding new controls.

The camera sits tilted, in the same style the studio used for its BMX finger game, and the presentation is 3D with what the developer describes as realistic physics and graphics. Trick name detection tells you what you just landed, which matters more than it sounds: in a game with this many named moves, seeing "bluntslide" appear is how you learn that a particular finger motion has a name.

Training, competition and free skating

Three modes cover the ways you might want to play. Training is the low-pressure option, and it pairs with tutorial videos that the developer includes so you can watch a trick and then attempt it yourself. Competition puts a clock on the session and asks for the highest score you can put together before time runs out. Jam Session is the open-ended one, where you roll around, string tricks together and work through challenges without a timer pressing on you.

The parks themselves are the other half of the structure. There are nine skateparks in total, with bowls, ramps, curbs, boxes and more than 2,000 meters of rails between them, so the layouts vary enough to change what you can attempt. Hundreds of challenges run across the game, and completing them unlocks decks, wheels, grip tape and stickers. The parts are cosmetic rewards rather than stat upgrades, which keeps the focus on your hands rather than on equipment numbers.

Google Play Games achievements are supported for players who like a record of what they have pulled off. A recent update added a camera setting that lets you choose between the default view and a zoomed-out one, along with stability fixes. Being able to widen the view is a small change, but in a game where you are judging distance to a rail, it is the sort of option that some players will switch on immediately.

What the free download includes

Touchgrind Skate 2 is free to play and supported by ads. The developer is direct about how the parks are split: one skatepark is included with the download, and the remaining eight are sold as in-app purchases. The structure is the base game plus those park purchases.

That structure is worth understanding before you start. The free park is enough to learn the controls and decide whether the finger-based approach clicks with you, and the paid parks are where the variety of bowls, ramps and rail lines expands. If you already know you want the full set of locations, the purchases are the price of admission; if you are curious but unsure, the included park is the sensible place to find out.

The player this is built for

This is a game for people who like the process of getting better at something awkward. If you have ever flicked a real fingerboard across a desk, the connection will be immediate, because the two-finger stance and the way the board flips under your hand follow the same logic. If you have not, the first sessions will feel clumsy, and that clumsiness is the point rather than a flaw to be patched out.

It also rewards players who enjoy naming and collecting tricks. The long list of grinds, slides and stances gives you vocabulary, and trick name detection turns each landing into a small confirmation. Chasing a clean line through a park, linking a kickflip into a tailslide and rolling away, is the kind of goal that does not need a story or an opponent behind it.

The flip side is that the game is not generous with imprecision. A player looking for a skateboarding game with forgiving inputs, a career narrative or a roster of characters will find this one narrow by comparison. What it offers instead is a physics toy with a score attached, and it asks you to bring the patience.

A fingerboarding game worth the practice

Touchgrind Skate 2 has held a large audience for a long time by doing one thing carefully: turning two fingers into a skateboard. The trick catalog is broad, the stances add depth without extra controls, and the three modes give you somewhere to practice, somewhere to compete and somewhere to roam. The 3.8 average from a very large number of ratings suggests plenty of people stuck with it and plenty found the learning curve steep.

The free download plus one included park is a fair way to test whether the controls suit your hands, and the eight additional parks are there if they do. Ads are part of the free experience, and the park purchases are the main cost to weigh.

I would point this at players who enjoy skill games, fingerboarding or skateboarding culture, and who are happy to spend a few sessions being bad at something before it starts to feel natural. If that describes you, the included park costs nothing but your time.

What's new in version 2.3.2

• New Camera setting: choose Default or Zoomed out for the in-game view • Other stability fixes