Crayola Scoot from Outright Games is a family title that combines aspects of Splatoon and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (but with a scooter instead of a skateboard) together to create an interesting blend of gameplay. During E3, I was able to see a small gameplay demo of the game which showed off character customization, the world hub, upgrades, and one of the many game modes available for play.
To start off, the demo player showed us the characters that you can pick from. You can choose either a boy or a girl to play as, and then you can deck yourself out in a variety of basic items as well as a main color. Once you have your character customized, we were dropped off into the main hub, which is a scooter park with entrances that lead to shops, game modes, and more. Before we went off to do anything else, we were shown some of the gameplay. The character would grind on railings, go off ramps to perform airborne tricks, and while doing all of that, paint would be left behind to cover the area. As stated before, the game seems like a mashup of Splatoon, because of the gameplay with covering an area with your color, and THPS, because of the tricks you can perform and the rewards you get for ramping up multiple, complex tricks at once. There were also a couple special places where you could perform a trick in order to cover a lot of a certain area with your color at once. Also, when you ride through your own color, your speed increases. You also have a little boost meter than can be used to travel quickly and leave a trail of paint behind you, and it charges up slowly, but it recharges faster the more points you get from doing tricks.
Once we had seen how the game was played, we were shown a few different types of items you can buy for your character. You can add on new parts to your scooter that give small buffs, and the most important part, you can buy all sorts of cool cosmetic apparel for your character with in-game money. Once we had a fresh new look, we explored the different game modes, which included a tag mode to a basic game mode where you just have to cover the most ground with your color. For the demo, we were shown the basic game mode. Before being dropped into the game, we had the option of picking legendary characters in conjunction with your customized character. These legendary character are unlocked by completing challenges issued by the respective character. Those characters ranged from a robot, to a knight, and to a cat, but we decided to stick with our customized avatar.
The mode is more of a free-for-all mode instead of a cooperative game mode like in Splatoon‘s turf war mode. Six players start on the map, and you are set loose to cover as much area as you can in 3 minutes. Scattered throughout the map are trick triggers, which ended up being very helpful to cover lots of area really fast. While doing tricks, you can actually fail if you don’t land correctly, and you end up falling onto the ground. It takes only a couple seconds to get back on your scooter, but being incapacitated from play, even for a short time, can end up causing you to fall behind in intense matches. On the top right of the screen, there was a wheel that showed how much color each player had on the field at the time. It was a close game, but my demo player managed to edge out a win. Afterwards, the short demo was over.
The most exciting part about this whole game concept is that it will have 4-player split screen at launch, and this was an important aspect that the developers wanted to focus on. Crayola Scoot will be due out October 23 of this year for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.