Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4

"Comes with free attitude."

The Tony Hawk Pro Skater (THPS) series has gone from strength to strength over the years evolving into one of the most popular video game franchises around. It has most certainly stood the test of time and fought of worthy competition from the likes of Aggressive Inline, SSX and other extreme sports titles. Ever since the first game was a success on Playstation One the development team at Neversoft have never looked back and this years instalment of the series, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4, brings the classic formula back with some nice new gameplay changes to keep things fresh and fun. THPS 3 fans should not write this one of as ‘a small upgrade. Instead, think long and hard about picking this one up, there are a lot of little changes, news moves, levels and other such things that make playing through the game worthwhile (not to mention it’s a lot of fun)! Let’s take a closer look to see if it’s worth it for casual fans of the series.

I guess the best place to start is with the slick gameplay where THPS 4 delivers another flawless example of what games should be like – easy to pick up, hard to put down. One of my favourite new additions are the moves your character can do while he/she manual along the ground. Handstands, flip tricks, hand flips and pogo bouncing make performing a manual very cool and it’s a great way to keep your combo going and increase your point multiplier. This is probably the biggest change/addition to the gameplay mechanics. The controls have been tweaked slightly but nothing to radical and old school THPS players will feel right at home.

From the outset there are two main modes in THPS 4 – career and two-player. Career mode lets the player jump into the shoes of up to fourteen of the world’s best skaters to travel around the globe to skate in locations such as San Francisco, London and Chicago. Of the fourteen skaters the most recognisable is, of course, Tony Hawk but some of the cast are now making their fourth appearance in this series and are becoming just as popular as the protagonist. If you don’t like any of the 14 skaters (heaven forbid) you can indulge in the ‘create-a-skater’ feature and there are plenty of attributes to muck about with.

For the first time in the series you do not need to go back and play the game through with every single character to unlock their individual movies, boards and so on. In this version of THPS there are 175 goals scattered across the nine levels and you can use any character you wish to go and achieve them. Unlike the previous THPS games you do not have a timed run, instead you are free to skate around the level and if you wish to attempt a goal just skate up to a person with a convenient arrow above their head and hit the X-button. You are then given your goal and can go on your way to achieve it. These goals vary, from collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E around a level to leaping certain gaps or saving a bunch of seals from a hungry shark. Yes, some of the goals are crazy but it certainly makes the game a lot of fun.

On top of the 175 standard goals each skater has one pro challenge unique to them. By completing these goals (which I might add are very hard) you unlock a video for that character (Rodney Mullen has the best video of the lot just quietly). I would personally like to thank the developers for not making us have to do every single objective with all 15 skaters to unlock everything – while it does shorten the game quite a bit it relieves a lot of ‘chore’ gaming.

On top of the 190 goals and pro challenges there are also 25 cash icons in every level worth $100 each. Players also earn cash by achieving the series of aforementioned goals and also by hunting out all the gaps in the game. Cash can be used to buy things like bonus skaters (four in total), bonus levels (two in total), cheats, videos and skateboards for each of the players (I counted about 200 individual skateboards in the game each with it’s own unique ‘art’). Buying (read: unlocking) everything in THPS 4 does take a while but there is a unique sense of satisfaction when you ‘own’ the game 100%.

Aesthetically THPS 4 is very good. I’m not to nit picky when it comes to graphics, if it looks okay and does the job I’m generally happy. The levels are quite heavily detailed with unique textures and artwork. The character models are very average and I would say that not much work was done on them since THPS 3, if any. On the upside the animations for each skaters moves and tricks look awesome. The characters flow nicely between grab and flip moves and there is plenty of individuality with each of the special moves.

As mentioned earlier you can unlock videos of the skaters performing in real life and these are very nifty and flow together with background music to make a nice package. However the GameCube videos feature some compression problems and at some stages the videos can become quite blocky. It doesn’t spoil the video but it certainly takes away from the polish of the title.

Tony Hawk titles have always had a great soundtrack and of course this version is no different. Some of the bands performing this time round include City Stars, System of a Down, The Sex Pistols and the cover song just happens to be TNT by AC/DC – it can’t really get any better! The mixture of classic rock, modern hip-hop/rap, punk and nu-metal certainly makes for a varied selection of tracks to listen to whilst playing and I can’t say that I hate any of the tracks. For those that only like a few songs you can edit the play-list to reflect your favourite, a nice add-in from Neversoft.

There is plenty of character dialogue this time around. When you skate up to someone and chat to him or her they will take about twenty seconds to go through what you have to do and it makes the experience a lot cooler than just reading through a bunch of text. There are also some nice sound effects and the sound of the boards’ wheels on the ground will differ depending on the surface you are skating on. Nice, subtle and tidy.

For some reason I was expecting the title to have a four-player option this time around but unfortunately the developers again have limited the multiplayer option to only include two-players. All the usual modes are there – free skate, high score, H-O-R-S-E and Neversoft chucked in a few new games for good measure. ‘Combo Mambo’ basically gives players 2 minutes to land the biggest combo they can, the person with the biggest combo wins. ‘King of the Hill’ is also new – players must first find the ‘kings crown’ that is placed randomly in the level. Once they find it they must avoid the other player at all costs, if they are tagged the crown becomes the other players. The person who holds the crown the longest over the time period wins. I prefer the older modes better but even still they wont last long with only 2 people able to enjoy them at a time.

What’s left to say? Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 is a great game. There are plenty of new objectives to achieve, moves to learn and levels to explore for those returning to the series and there is certainly a lot of fun to be had for first timers. Highly recommended.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/05/03, Updated 04/05/03