Kids love Crayola crayons and coloring books.  Who doesn’t remember the smell of a freshly opened box?  Kids also love extreme sports and riding on their scooters outside.  So what happens when you mix the fun of scooting in a skate park with the colorful magic of Crayola?  You get Crayola Scoot, that’s what.  It’s basically just Tony Hawk Pro Skater but with scooters, combined with color splatting gameplay from Splatoon.  It’s available on nearly all current home consoles and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

The first thing you’ll do is create your character.  Choose gender, height, skin tone, and clothes.  You can also choose the color of your clothes, from choices straight from the Crayola crayon box!  You’ll also pick your paint color, too (more on that later).  Then you’ll hit the scooter park, where you’ll get a brief intro to controls and how the game works.  Move around with the L stick and start moving with the R trigger button.  The L button boosts and there are also buttons for braking, jumping, and grinding.  And to do tricks in the air, move the R stick.  Yeah it sounds like a lot, but the tutorial does a better job explaining it.

You’ll start off at a skate park where you can practice your tricks, but there are other areas you can go to.  In the middle of the entrance is a portal where you can take on several skate challenges against other computer players.  These timed events will have you doing things like splatting the most area of the park with your color paint.  You splat paint when you do tricks, grind, and boost.  When you scoot on your color paint, your paint meter will refill faster, too.  Other events require you to do the most tricks to get the highest score, find hidden Crayola crayons, and more.  Every event has multiple difficulty levels, too.

When you win enough events, your experience will go up, and you’ll gain levels.  Gaining levels gives you access to more events, skate parks (with themes like forest, castle, and futuristic), and more clothes to customize your character with.  But before you can reach the next level, you’ll have to challenge a special character to a trick contest.  These include silly characters like a zombie, alligator, witch, and more.  Once you beat them, you’ll have access to their clothes and scooter parts, too!

Other areas in the hub are the shop where you can buy items to customize your character, an antigravity room where you can try out tricks, and an arcade where up to four local players can compete in events.  Really the only problem I had was the controls.  It’s not that they’re bad, in fact, they’re great.  But I had a hard time remembering which button does what, but then, I haven’t played a skating game in a long time, and even then I didn’t play very many.  Crayola Scoot may not be very original, but it’s still a solid game for the whole family.

Kid Factor:

Nothing too terribly violent here.  You can crash and fall off your scooter, but you just flop on the cement with an ‘oof!’ and the game splats with color as it fades back to you on your scooter.  All the characters wear helmets and knee and elbow pads, and none of the crashes are depicted in a painful way.  Reading is a must as everything is text based (I do wish the text were bigger and not yellow in color, though).  While the game has a good tutorial, the controls are complex enough that it’s best enjoyed by older kids.  Crayola Scoot is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews