Throughout the years sports games evolved from the classic soccer and basketball simulations. While Pro Evolution Soccer and NBA Live still have the biggest player base, some of the more radical games still managed to break through. The SSX snowboarding series comes to mind, or the even more of the hook basketball arcade franchise NBA Street. What is the thing that all of these games have in common that separates them from their more serious cousins? Tricks. Leg-breaking, jaw-dropping, I-eat-1080’s-for-breakfast tricks. And it was none other than Tony Hawk with his Pro Skater game that started this.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 was and still is the absolute best

The first few Tony Hawk Pro Skater games didn’t contain much of a story. In fact, they were true arcade games, where you went from level to level, trying to set a new high score. Anyone who played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 will probably agree with me that as far as extreme sports games are concerned, that game was and still is the absolute best. It contained the perfect amount of stages, the controls were as tight as one could hope for and the soundtrack was great. In all fairness, all of the follow-ups still had all of the above in abundance, but because Neversoft decided to add so many new features the gameplay lost its focus and thus its major appeal.


With Project 8 the authors decided to put back some of that old Pro Skater feel into what has become a very stagnant series. Just as with the two Underground predecessors, the game still has you create a new skater and then gradually rise up the rooster. The objective? Becoming one of the best eight skaters in town and in so doing earning a place in Tony Hawk’s latest undertaking- Project 8. And while the town isn’t all that big, there are still over two hundred other skaters out there with whom you’ll have to compete.

Judging by Project 8’s massive play field the days of smaller, separate stages are over for good. While having an entire town as your own personal playground is nice and presents some very unique opportunities, I personally miss the stages from THPS2, which were better tuned and just felt better. I'm not saying that I this GTA-ish trend is a bad idea, but one of the main reasons I prefer the old Tony Hawk games is the way you could jump into a stage, play around for a minute or two and move on. With no stages whatsoever in Project 8, this can be a bit hard to achieve and since skating around aimlessly isn’t much fun you won’t catch yourself craving for a quick ollie followed by a kickflip all that often.

Grinding down a sidewalk or spinning on a fire hydrant

As it is you’ll be spending the majority of time completing challenges located all over the place. While you’ll be limited to only a few choices in the beginning, completing them will open new areas and present you with dozens of new tasks to complete. You get these tasks from passersby and except for a few really unique ones they mostly include recording a film (you have to follow a cameraman, doing tricks as instructed), proving your skills (doing a specific trick at a certain spot) or doing minor tricks around the stage (thus destroying posters for example). In-between these undertakings you can work on completing Spot-Challenges. They are small, almost trivial tasks such as grinding down a sidewalk or spinning on a fire hydrant. Completing them usually only takes seconds and since they are started automatically when you start doing your trick on the marked out places around the map they are a great way to accumulate points on your way from one challenge to the next.


Speaking of challenges, there is no difficulty setting in the game. Instead, every challenge has three goals, each one increasingly more difficult than the last. You might have to complete a 60 feet long grind to get points, but you’ll have to go over 80 to unlock a higher prize and do the impossible feat of grinding for over 100 feet for the highest award. While this approach sounds excellent on paper it has its fair share of shortcomings. The most annoying one is that some of the challenges are near impossible to complete until much later when your skater is more skilled. I wouldn’t mind tricks that were just hard to pull off until I, the player, was more experienced, but making me redo almost every single challenge just because my skater wasn’t good enough in the beginning is just plain stupid.

Hand in hand with this problem is the very slow skater leveling. The time needed to raise a stat is exponential with its current level, so it will take countless grinds before you’ll finally be good enough to pull off that sick trick a challenge wants you to perform. The same holds true for all the stats, and getting highscores in the trick challenges is near impossible until your jump skill is good enough to stay in the air for a few seconds longer than normally. Thankfully there are plenty of tasks available at all times, so you won’t run out of things to do before you level up. The skill progress is also fairly well timed with your rising in ranks, so you’ll max out all your stats approximately at the same time you make it into the top eight.

Nail that trick

Controlling your skater hasn’t really changed from the previous installments, so I won’t go into details about them. They are still as precise as ever, and you’ll never have to blame the controls for a failed trick. As with all THPS games the authors implemented some fresh moves and an entirely new mechanic called Nail a trick.

Pressing both of the analog nubs in while in the air initiates this new mode. When this happens the time slows down to a crawl and the camera moves to the side of the skater, putting his skate into the center of the screen. Your task? Using the two nubs to control each of the feet and perform tricks. Moving both sticks up will make your skater move both feet up (resulting in a spectacular crash) for example. The implementation is flawless and you can actually feel proud when you manage to nail a really good trick down.


Unlike the Xbox360 version the PS3 version supports Six-Axis controls as well. Tilting the controller left or right will make your skater change direction and moving the joypad around in combination with presses of the face buttons results in tricks being performed. It takes some time getting used to and it isn’t as precise as the standard control method, but it’s a nice addition anyway. Six-axis control is also the only point in favor of the PS3. While the graphics look more or less the same (the PS3 version uses a more aggressive implementation of HDR) the PS3 version does tend to stutter far more. The looks of the game aren’t half bad, but suffering 15 frames per second in the middle of a jump is just not something we should be forced to swallow. Loading times are atrocious on the PS3 as well – starting the game up takes almost a full minute! And what the heck happened to online support? You can play with a pal on one PS3, but that’s as far as multiplayer goes (a shame, especially considering that the PS2 Tony Hawk games supported online multiplayer years ago).

Conclusion

There is no denying it; Project 8 isn’t half as good as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 was. There are dozens of explanations for that, but the most obvious reason is the lack of polish the PS3 version of the game got. Those issues aside, Project 8 is by far the best part of the series since Neversoft released the first Tony Hawk Underground. The choice to drop the whole story progression aspect and instead make raising in ranks the top objective paid off, as the game is a lot more focused than the previous attempts. All in all the game is a step in the right direction and hopefully the next installment won’t be as half-arsed as this one.

Gameplay	7/10	It’s THPS2 with loads of unnecessary stuff slapped on. Still very enjoyable.
Graphics	7/10	It looks good, but the framerate is very unstable. The camera doesn’t help make things better either.
Sound	7/10	The selection of songs is great, though I miss the days when Motorhead was a part of the lineup.
Value	8/10	It will take ages for you to complete all the challenges. A lot of that time will be wasted on making your skater better though.
Multiplayer	2/10	One on one skating on a single PS3 is all you get… A huge letdown.
Overall (not an average)	6.9/10	The core gameplay is still great, but the drawn out progression, lack of multiplayer and technical issues make this game only average.