From the team that brought us Tony Hawk: Ride and Tony Hawk: Shred comes a much better game, although I suppose that isn’t saying much. It doesn’t have a shitty board peripheral so there’s that. Activision has decided to test the waters with their THPS franchise that hasn’t seen the light of day in years with a slimmed down HD collection of a few maps from the first two games. It’s a decent collection but it just ends up leaving me wanting for more and not in a good way.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD
Developer: Robomodo
Price: 1200 points [$15]
Platform: Xbox 360 (reviewed) [PC and PS3 release later this summer]
The game plays just as it did years ago but I felt something about the physics was a bit off, but I’ll attribute that to it being years since I touched a THPS game. Once I got into the flow of things all the memories came flooding back while pulling off some impressive combos, linking combos with manuals, finding all the secret areas, and completing old goals. As you can expect you have a career to go through with a required amount of goals to unlock the next level. You’ll go around collecting letters, snagging hidden DVD’s, pulling off sick combos, and other objectives throughout the seven levels. You’ll find Warehouse, School II, Hangar, Mall, Venice Beach, Downhill Jam, & Marseilles waiting for you to shred through with two of the maps being downhill jam stages. I personally felt this list was pretty damn lackluster with only Warehouse, School II, and Hangar being the notable maps out of the list. Most of the older objectives from the original games return with a few new ones and they’re all overall pretty simple enough to complete besides the scores. Once you 100% a skater’s career you’ll be able to go back through all the levels to complete ‘projectives’ which are harder versions of various objectives. Besides the career mode there’s also free skate, big head survival, and hawkman to keep you occupied in singleplayer. The basic idea behind big head survival is that your head keeps growing and you need to land combos to keep it from exploding. In hawkman you need to collect colored pellets in a certain amount of time and certain colors have a requirement for picking them up such as manuals required to grab green dots. Multiplayer adds in the classic trick attack and graffiti modes. You’ll collect cash while playing which can be used to upgrade the stats on your skater and buy new boards or tricks. There a few newer skaters to round up the roster along with a few of the originals and you can also play as your Xbox avatar. There are even a few secret characters with some pretty difficult requirements to unlock. There is no Spider-Man. Seriously Activision, you own the fucking license so what’s your excuse?
The skating is just as smooth as you remember and I found myself pulling off all of my favorite tricks without any issues. There are a few weird things that got left out which makes the things that got put in a little weird. First things first, bailing out of a trick and reverts aren’t here. Their excuse for not including things like bailing out of a combo and reverts is that those weren’t in the first two games so they felt that they shouldn’t include it. The problem with that is that even though the older games weren’t designed with those features in mind, it’s still stupid to not include them especially since this is a complete remake with a different engine. It’s not like telling Konami to add in things from DMC3 into DMC1 and 2 in their HD collections; it’s perfectly reasonable to put these things in THPS HD. I can understand not throwing in spine transfers since none of the maps in this game have any place where you can use that, but when you max out your skater you start to make jumps that require bailing. It’s also weird since they included the perfect/sloppy system from the later games. The fact that they said reverts will be included in the THPS3 DLC maps only just shows how ridiculous the situation is. It’s even weirder considering the revert animation is in the game, you just can’t link combos with it.
It’s a damn shame that they couldn’t be bothered enough to include split-screen especially since they clearly went to the trouble of making new modes, adding free-skate, and a host of other features such as multiplayer. Just as with my complaint over the lack of reverts or bailing, split-screen is definitely something that could have been included. They did bother putting in online multiplayer which is fun, but I really would’ve preferred being able to sit with my friends and play locally.
The graphics are nice enough but they’re nothing worth praising. Don’t get me wrong the graphics are amazing compared to the original games, but they definitely could have looked better with HD games like Sly Cooper and Halo. Hell, Proving Ground looks miles ahead of this game so it makes me wonder why they couldn’t just make the game off that engine instead of the dated Unreal Engine 3. The soundtrack is pretty disappointing as well with a dozen tracks and only 3 or 4 of them worthy of being in a THPS soundtrack. I don’t get why Activision couldn’t have made it a soundtrack purely from THPS 1 and 2 instead of adding songs nobody will really care about. You’re remaking this to bank on our nostalgia Activision, don’t fuck it up by fucking with our nostalgia. They also dropped the ball on not adding any sort of soundtrack customization. Let me turn off what I don’t want to listen to because you usually have a lot of really bad stuff in your games; SSX did this the right way.
The Final Word
Activision took the first step in a brighter future for the Tony Hawk franchise, but it just wasn’t a big enough step. The game is lacking many features from the franchise and there are some questionable map choices that makes you wonder why they didn’t just remake the entirety of the first game instead of giving us a few decent maps. It’s a solid enough game, but it’s disappointing that this is the best Activision could give us after years of waiting for the next true THPS game.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
