Mission Wicked Light ViBE hockey skate review 2001

I bought these Mission skates at ePuck.com in August 2001. The skates cost US$500, plus shipping (about US$50.00), VAT (17.5%), and customs duties (around 2.5% if I remember correctly). That's a lot of money to pay for a pair of skates, but I think these skates are worth it. The performance, build quality, and comfort they provide is simply amazing. In my opinion this is one fine looking pair of skates, and they almost always get loads of attention at a game.

Boot

As the top end Mission inline hockey skate for 2001, the boots are extremely stiff. In fact they are so stiff that only heating would get them to conform to my foot properly. Mission give these skates a stiffness rating of 7.5, as compared with the 5.3 stiffness rating of Steve Runyeard's Mission Proto Vs also reviewed here. The boot gets the same stiffness rating as the Mission Proto VSi Team 2000 owned by Zak Uawithya.

Inside the boot is really comfortable with a beautiful soft synthetic leather liner. The tongue is made from neoprene, called Mission's "FootSox". This is quite comfortable and together with the "Indy Foam" ankle pads, seems to hold your heel firmly in place back in the boot.

The toe area is formed plastic with welcome ventilation holes. Ventilation and cooling is so important when playing indoor hockey in the summer! The toe also has more volume and to my feet is more comfortable than the toe of the Bauer Vapor 8 boots. That's probably just personal preference or my strangely shaped feet, though!

The entire skate (US size 10D, roughly equivalent to a UK 9) weighs 1420 grams, somewhat heavier than the 1370 grams of Zak's Mission Proto VSI Team 2000, which are a US 9, and the 1530g of my Bauer Vapor 8s (which don't have micro bearings, and are heavily penalized by the metal rocker in the Tuuk Rocker Chassis). Most of the extra weight can be attributed to the ViBe chassis, which Mission claim to add another 70-90 grams. Actually, I was rather disappointed in the weight of the Wicked Lights because my expectations were unreasonably high due to the name and all the hype that I had read around the internet before purchase.

The sole is Mission's "Sensory Carbon Outsole", which seems to be a fancy name for a stiff carbon fiber sole. Mission have unfortunately stopped using the excellent Superfeet foot bed as found on many of last year's skates, but the replacement Mission "Sensory Foot bed" is quite acceptable.

Note the small white bumpers on the side of the foot. They are quite small, and mine have already worn away more than I'd like, but there is still a lot of material left. These are not as big or as hard wearing as the bumpers on many of my other pairs of skates, unfortunately.

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Wicked Light Ankle Support

Given the stiffness of the boot, ankle support is excellent and, surprisingly, not restrictive. There's plenty of room to flex the ankle as much as I require, although these skates are definitely in the modern class of stiff skates. I've found that quite a few more experienced skaters used to older boot technologies are not taking to these modern stiff skates, but I love the improved power delivery you get with such a firm boot.

These skates are unusual for Mission skates in that they have a flexible neoprene Achilles tendon guard, whereas many other Mission models have a leather tendon guard with 2 holes. It seems to work well, though, and is very comfortable.

The Indy Foam ankle pads are excellent, form well to the shape of your ankle bones, and stay flexible over the 3 months I've played indoors with these skates. I have a problem with these because the ankle inserts are stitched in, leaving a seam that can sometimes irritate my skin, so I feel Mission could have done a better job on the material covering the ankle inserts, either by making a seamless join, or using a single covering material. In fairness this has only been a minor problem since I heat molded the skates.

One additional item of interest is that the Wicked Light ankle form leans differently to that on the Proto VSi Team skates. The VSi Team skates have an ankle pocket that leans further forward than that of the Wicked Light, and apparently is preferred by many players.

Heat molding

As mentioned above, this boot is so stiff you needn't bother trying to break it in without baking it. I suffered with a lot of blisters at first, and had no improvement even after several weeks of tough games, so I did heat mold the boots. Unfortunately there's no skate bake oven near me, so I got brave with a heat gun.

I'd not recommend using a heat gun as it's too easy to heat the boot unevenly and get hot spots that damage the composite materials forming the boot. The benefit of using a skate bake oven is that the oven is designed to heat the boot slowly, uniformly, and under control, thus avoiding these damaging hotspots. Using a kitchen oven is probably not a good idea either!

Anyway, I've done a lot of solar-filming on radio controlled model aircraft, so I was confident enough to use my heat gun, taking a lot of care to heat the boot of one skate at a time slowly and evenly. I then put the skate on, tied the laces as for normal skating, and stood crouched in a hockey stance for 15 minutes or so until the boot cooled sufficiently to be set properly. Now for the next skate...

After heat molding, the points where the skates were painful disappeared, and the skates then fitted my foot incredibly well. The heat treatment made all the difference as the boot material softened really well with relatively minimal heating, and then hardened quickly once left to cool. These skates are now the best fitting and most comfortable skates I own, even when compared with my soft boot recreational skates.

Mission ViBE Frame

The frame is Missions by now well known ViBE (stands for "Variable integrated Balance Engineering") frame, which has small elastomer based shock absorbers on the front and rear wheels. These shock absorbers can be pre-tensioned to allow varying amounts of resistance, or can be locked up completely by adjusting a small bolt underneath the housing.

I suspect that this chassis is a response by Mission to the Bauer Tuuk Rocker Chassis, in that Mission felt they had to get some kind of mechanically enhanced chassis out to compete. As far as I know, the Tuuk Rocker Chassis was developed by SmartHockey.com, and licensed to Bauer/Nike for their exclusive use. Personally, I'm not convinced on the technical merits of either chassis, but both the Mission Wicked Light ViBEs and the Bauer Vapor 8 skates work very well for me and are both great skates.

Other than the ViBE portion, the chassis is well made from extruded aluminium in the standard Hi-Lo setup, where the two front wheels are 72mm, and the two rear wheels are 80mm. This chassis is strong, and I think will stand up to a lot of abuse.

ePuck.com customer service (which I rate highly - they will even point out a particular product's bad points when answering queries) rated the Mission skate as having slightly better grip, and the Bauer skate as having a little more manoeuvrability, which fits my experience. They also validated some customers' comments that the Vibe housing would sometimes touch down if you lean the skate too much when stopping, which I've also found to be the case. That generally results in you falling because the ViBE housing lifts the wheels off the ground if you go too low while doing a sliding stop.

I don't find this to be much of a problem as I don't think the skates should be angled that far to the ground to get the most controlled and effective stops. The slip out occasionally gets me in the heat of a game.

Wheels, Axles, and Bearings

Wheels are Red Star Snipers, with two 72mm wheels in front, and two 80mm wheels in the rear making up the Hi-Lo chassis that is so much the standard of inline hockey. These wheels have been designed for lightness with big cores to reduce the amount of urethane on the wheel and reducing the amount of flex from the soft compound. The wheels are all 74A, so are quite soft, and thus have excellent grip, nearly as good as the grip from the softer Kryptonics Wicked Sticky 76mm/72A wheels I put on my Bauer Vapor 8 inline skates.

As with many recent skates, micro bearings are used, again to attempt to reduce weight. I'm not convinced on the use of micro bearings, but the 3 sets I own have performed acceptably so far. You can now see why inline skates are so much heavier than ice skates, given the wheels and the necessarily stronger and heavier frame.

Personally I don't like the two-piece Mission axles as much as the Bauer single piece ones, but that's of no real consequence if deciding whether to buy these skates.

Overall Conclusion - Mission Wicked Light ViBE

These are great inline hockey skates, perhaps the best pair I've skated on. They have excellent grip, have a good balance between manoeuvrability and stability, and are really comfortable. The boot is so strong that you have plenty of protection from pucks. They are not without their faults, but are my favourite pair, and I will almost certainly buy another pair of Mission skates next time round.

I took a puck on the ankle from a powerful wrist shot last night, and as it happened I thought "Sh$%, that's really going to hurt!!!" - you know how your body sometimes takes a little while to feel the pain. It didn't hurt at all in the end, and not much of the force got through because the boot is so strong and stiff. I'm really glad the skate protected my ankle like that.

Disclaimer

As usual, this review is only my opinion about these skates, and your mileage may vary. You should always carefully judge whether the skates you intend buying are best suited for you and for the purpose you intend using. Remember that fit and comfort are extremely important, and you may wish to read the inline skating buying guide here on this site.

Mission Wicked Light ViBE Hockey Skate Review

Review by Mike van Erp.