Tony Hawk's Project 8

"Project 8: Create an Absence"

Tony Hawks project eight is a bit of a disappointment. That's not the most promising start for a review, but upon starting the game you'll find it's not the most promising start. At the start your presented with your options, which are missing in numbers. Missing is pretty much the word of choice for this review.

Assuming you start with the career mode you'll be asked to create your skater. Nothing different here from the last three Tony Hawks titles. You'll be given the choice of three body types, Punk, Urban, or Child, all male. From here there is a limited set of choices you can make customising the appearance of this Skater. There is none of the choice in creation previous titles have had. Likewise if you wish to start with a quick blast on Free Skate you'll notice the limited choice of skaters. The actual number at the end is fine, but at the start of the game the only characters you can choose from are your custom skater, or Tony Hawk himself. Everyone else has to be unlocked.

Once you get into the game itself things don't appear so bad. A couple of tricks have been removed, with other things changed but for the most part it's the same game to play. flip tricks are still achieved by pressing square and a direction, grabs are still circle, walking can still be done by pressing L1 and R1. The Parkou moves from the last game have been ditched though, as has the freak out. Most people won't miss these as they were seldom used, and often difficult to work into a combo. Likewise graffiti tagging has gone. Obviously this means that the create a tag option has been removed. Another thing gone is the vehicles. There's no bikes, no wheelchairs, drivable cars. Heck with the exception of a couple of levels there aren't even any skitchable vehicles to be seen.

The levels themselves are a rather varied bunch, but a couple suffer from being a bit overly bland and you may be left thinking "haven't I seen this before?" You start in the suburbs, which consists of a few houses and there surrounding gardens. Obvious comparisons with Surburbia from Tony Hawks three can be drawn, but it won't be enough to give you deja vu. The High School level looks a lot like the school levels from previous games, and will certainly remind people of the School in Tony Hawks 2. Downtown is pretty similar to Downtown from American Wasteland, and City Centre has a similar look to San Diego from THUG. Create Park is the normal concrete skate park, albeit in the middle of being demolished. The Fun Park is an interesting variation, with giant dragons and pirate ships to grind on. Perhaps the most interesting level is the Jeep Factory. It's a bit similar to the Foundry from Pro Skater 3, but much larger, and actually looks like a real factory, with offices, and break areas thrown in as well as assembly lines, paint rooms with robotic arms, and a front desk.

The size of most of the levels makes up for the fact that there are only seven main levels in career, as apposed to the eight minimum we've come to expect. It'll take a fair while learning your bearings in some of these. This however doesn't make up for the severely limited number. The full game has only eight levels, no more. The Last level is the Downhill level, which was the bonus level for THPS3 for the psone (which was also made by Shaba Games), but with the bottom of it changed and the large Christ statue removed so as not to tie it to Rio de Janeiro. This makes the level slightly worse, as the bowl at the bottom is replaced by a house floating in water, and pretty much ends your combo if you reach the bottom of the hill.

The levels themselves are well thought out, with lots of lines for combos. Some of the goals however are not. The goals have the usual fare, with pull this trick over that object, find all of those, and smash up that thing that's in the way all, appearing fairly frequently. Most goals are split into three types, Am, Pro, and Sick. You only need to complete the Am part of the goal to continue, but for true completion, Sick is required. This system is the best system to date difficulty wise, as it means that you won't get stuck on one goal if your trying to clear everything at pro or sick level.

Classic goals are now integrated into the regular career, and count towards your ranking. A couple of new goal types do make things interesting, with there being a couple of races thrown in. These would be good if the opponents didn't look like cardboard cutouts attached to scalextric tracks, and had better AI. Perhaps the best goal type (and one you'll only see twice unfortunately) is the puzzle goals. These are where you get to arrange a limited selection of piece types, ala the custom parks. However you can beat these goals by just putting down a couple of kickers in the most obvious place and it's done.

The puzzle goals are also the closest you'll get to actually making a custom park, as that option is also missing from this game, leaving you with just the eight default levels. Something which severely kills the lifespan of this title.To further shorten it's length, online play has also been dropped.

To sum up so far, this game is missing the ability to create and make tags, the parkou and freak-out tricks, any alternate type of vehicles, any sense of depth in the create a skater, create a special, and on-line play. It's quite a lot to be missing isn't it? So what have we gained to compensate for all this then? Well we have gained more videos in the terms of some behind the scenes stuff on motion capture for Project 8, stating how each skateboarder now has "his (or her) own unique style shown in game as they skate". Only it isn't, as this is footage from the next gen version.

One useful thing is the gap keys which unlock a short clip of how to achieve another gap, for every gap you land, you get a key, and this can be used to see how another gap is obtained. This is a good idea, and makes gap hunting just that little bit easier. However the last level, Downhill, does not actually have a gap list, which is quite a glaring omission.

The only other thing we've gained, is the ability to control a flip with just the sticks. This is actually quite difficult to do, with each foot being controlled by each stick. It seems like a good idea, but it is not. It's hard to use, and really not worth doing.

The biggest gripe with this game is not about what's in the game, more what's missing. When Shaba made THPS3 for the psone, they took the the whole of the game from Tony Hawk's 2, and inserted levels similar to that of it's bigger next gen brother. While the same has happened here, so much has been lost in doing it that it's not the same game anymore. If it was possible for THAW to have a large free roaming level which used narrow corridors for loading screens, why couldn't this title have done it? THUG 2 had fifteen levels in total, and still had enough room on the disc to insert more additional stuff to the gameplay than this game has. Stuff has been going missing from the series for a while, but it took me a long while to notice the lack of create a deck in THUG, and even longer to realise that Create a Goal had gone missing from THAW; but this is too big a dissapearnce of too many things at once to not go unnoticed. I can't understand why Shaba couldn't just do a re-release of THAW with different levels like they succeeded in doing when they made THPS3.

Overall Project 8 is not a bad game, if this were an original title, it would have scored better but it's just that we've seen all this done far better in previous titles. This doesn't feel like a full game, more of a budget title. If you really want a skateboarding fix, rent this, otherwise save yourself some money and buy THUG, you can find that in most second hand shops for about a tenner now, and you'll get more game play out of it than you will this.

Graphics: 8
The levels are detailed and impressive to see, they look less like cardboard than the previous titles did.

Sound: 6
All the metal clunks are still here, but the songs this time aren't really anything special.

Gameplay: 9
Goals are challenging and varied, and just simply skateboarding around can be fun.

Lifespan: 4
Once you've completed the story there's really not much here to keep you playing.

Overall: 6
Good game ruined by lack of options

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/08/06