by: John Olin

November 15, 2005

I haven’t really sat down to play a Tony Hawk game since THPS4 so going from that to this was very daunting, especially since there is so much more in the game. The formula for tricks is more, the visuals are a bit better, the soundtrack is bigger, and overall there is more and more put on top of it, with a Classic Mode, Story Mode, and multiplayer options. Interestingly enough, the game is set in Los Angeles, and the game tries attempts to make a huge sprawling level, which means that there are technically no load times. The biggest draw here though, is collecting in Story Mode, and seeing who you can best in multiplayer.

Story mode puts you in the role of a runaway who comes to Los Angeles to fulfill his dreams of becoming a pro skater. Along the way you run into a few friends who will help you on your journey, with a goal of creating the ultimate skate park. You start out fairly weak with your stats, but as you progress and do certain objectives, your stats will increase. When you start out, you basically don’t have any of your moves like manuals, specials, etc that you might not be used to being stripped of. It can be really annoying at first, but you have to understand you play the role of a novice, and it does help you, as there are a lot of new moves to learn as well. It can be pretty daunting with how many moves there are to learn, so luckily the game gives you tutorials all over the place on how to do them in the form of goals. You can’t help but feel that you aren’t skating though, as much as learning something, and collecting goals. Half of the time the goals you are trying to complete have very little to do with skating, and even less often will you find competitions where you actually skate.

There are some new additions to the series here, besides the fact that you can customize your character, you have plenty of new moves. The bert slide which can actually be used to link up your combos is like surfing on the street. You also can do front flips, run up walls, kick off, and get onto another edge. As long as you do all of this within a timer limit, and get back on your board to do a trick, you will get the points. You can also spin your board on top of a pole, or a cylindrical object, which is actually pretty cool. There are a few other tricks, and nuances in the game, but put all of these together and you have some pretty insane, and fictional gameplay. The Tony Hawk games have always been pretty unbelievable, but this gets goofy sometimes. If you can get past that though, it is a very entertaining game. You also have the option to get off your board and ride a BMX bike, but the controls, as original as they are, end up being frustrating sometimes, and the BMX only normally has the purpose of earning you some extra cash. As the story progresses, so does your ultimate skate park, and it is pretty amazing what it turns into, but other than that, the story mode is find point A then go to point B, then point C, meaning you aren’t really trying to guess what is going on. Still the game has a pretty good story mode for a Tony Hawk game, but if you have ever played a Tony Hawk game for a good amount of time, you will be done with this in six hours tops.

As for one the game’s big draws, with no load times that isn’t true at all. When going from one area of LA to another, you have to go down tunnels, or halls, and they are fairly long halls, that cause the game to slowdown while it is loading the next area. Basically, there are load times, but they are fancy load times that let you walk around. There are a good amount of areas to skate in, and finding all the nooks and crannies of each level makes it all the much better when playing multiplayer. The bad thing is, there aren’t a lot of nooks to cranny out because the game makes all of it so obvious. The game also does a bad job of keeping you from exploiting the tricks, and I have found myself doing million point and two million point combos like they were nothing. If you are a skilled THPS skater, you could easily get at least five sometimes ten million point combos.