"I’ll never revert to THPS 2 or 1!"

OPENING STATEMENT
Sure, that last statement was a complete, bold-faced lie, but it allowed for a nice pun. Why, you ask? Because the ‘revert’ is the biggest new addition to the Tony Hawk gameplay this time around. (Last time it was the ‘manual.’) Once again, this has opened up many new doors in making enormous combos. When the guys at Activision first said that you “will triple your high score from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2” I was skeptical, but now that I have played the game, they were entirely correct. Yes, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 came out of the gate with huge claims. But I am here to tell you that the game lives up to all of them.

GAMEPLAY--9
Every gameplay aspect that made the previous Tony Hawk games so successful has returned. This, combined with the new revert move, makes Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 almost unbeatable in this department. The gameplay engine is what has always made the Tony Hawk series the pinnacle of the extreme sports sub-genre, and this keeps that streak alive. My biggest problem with the gameplay in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is that not enough additions were made. While Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 added a wealth of new add-ons when compared with the first title, THPS 3 is the revert and nothing else at all.

GRAPHICS--9
For those of you who have been playing the PlayStation versions of the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and THPS 2, this graphical jump will amaze you. However, if you were like me and played the Dreamcast versions far more than the PlayStation versions, you will not be as wowed. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 looks only marginally better than the Dreamcast THPS 2. Where the graphics are improved are the areas of level backgrounds and character designs. The level backgrounds are really a frivolous graphical area, since they never have any real impact on the game whatsoever. I mean, it is always nice to be able to see things miles away in Rio de Janiero, but it is not really required.

The graphical impact carried out by the changes to the skater designs, however, are quite important. One of my biggest problems with video games, even in this day and age, is the almost complete inability to make a character have a realistic looking face. Neversoft did a very nice job making the faces seem life like. Steve Caballero’s character startled me at first, until I looked in the Instruction Manual and realized that is what he actually looks like. The characters bodies are all made of thousands of polygons, and this shows, because tearing is nonexistent.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is not one of those games that will be colored wackily. It always stays very grounded in reality. Bright colors are scarce, but the earth tones that seem to be mentioned so often in this world The sky seems to be just the right shade of blue, something that has happened very rarely in video gaming. For the most part, grays are the most common color you will see, because of roads, ramps, wheels, and the like. But, as a whole, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is painted as many shades of gray as you could possibly imagine.

MUSIC--5
SOUND--9
The cycle of progressing continues - in each Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game, the soundtrack has gotten progressively worse. Nothing can top the first game’s tunes, with bands like Jurassic 5. Tony Hawk 2 presented much more of a mixed bag, but we still got some Rage Against the Machine in there to balance out the good and the bad. In THPS 3, we are presented with a variety of average metal bands, like Alien Ant Farm. The only quality band featured here is the Ramones, and if you don’t like classic punk, you are out of luck.

Thankfully the sound effects are done well. Realism is clearly the name of the game, as the game sounds just like the skate park up the road. (Ironically enough, directly behind a police station.) Especially humorous are the background noises of the crowds in competitions. The crowd in Rio de Janiero is about as stereotypical of a Hispanic crowd as you can possibly get without having the entire city of Woodland Hills bombarded with protests. Once you move on to Skater’s Island, the crowd is a bit more bitter, almost sounding like mean commuters in a traffic jam. And the mood changes once more as you progress to Tokyo. Neversoft clearly thought out all of these effects well, and you will never tire of hearing the amazingly realistic sound of hard plastic wheels on concrete.

CONTROL--10
The controls in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 are absolutely flawless. The control configuration will never give you any trouble at all; you will never hit the wrong button trying to pull off some tricks. The Dual Shock 2 controller fits this game nicely. More importantly are the fact that it is never too difficult to pull off a combo. The button series that you have to press are never insanely long, and they never get beyond three presses unless you are combining tricks. The addition of the revert move did nothing to clutter up the controller, although it may present some problems for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on some other consoles (mainly those consoles that do not have four shoulder buttons.) On top of all of that, your characters respond instantly to your commands, as there is no lag time between the controller and the console.

FUN--6
The lack of fun in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 does not stem from the fact that it recycles almost all of the aspects of the previous games in the series that were done well. It stems from the fact that fundamentally, this game is a giant step backwards from its predecessor. The money system, as I shall call it, was the biggest, and best, change in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. It allowed you to completely customize your characters, and decide whether you wanted to spend your hard-earned cash on statistical points, boards, or new tricks for your skater. In this regard, Tony Hawk 3 is far more similar to the original Tony Hawk. Levels are opened not by dollar values, but by number of objectives completed. In all actuality, the dollar system does not exist anymore. Even more important is the fact that the customization is gone. There are five stat points in each level, no more. You can choose what those five stats upgrade, but nothing else. There is also one new board in each level. You cannot get any more tricks. So, you can actually maximize out your stats and boards completely well-before completing all of the level objectives. This was a dumb, dumb move by Neversoft.

An equally moronic move on their part was the decision to make the levels look more mainstream. So, most of the features in levels are not from skate parks at all. Instead you will be grinding on gutters of haunted houses and airline check-in desks. I just want simple levels that actually look like locales where skating should take place. My favorite level in any of the Tony Hawk games is actually the simple Woodland Hills Warehouse, the first level from the inaugural game. It was the smallest level of all of them to date. But it actually looked like a skate park. Please note that the other two levels that I enjoy immensely, Portland and Philadelphia also look like skate parks. Philadelphia may be quite a bit more wide open than the level from Oregon, but there is still the one area in the level that is just a skate park, nothing more. That is why I looked forward to the competitions so much in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. Those levels were the only levels that I actually felt comfortable skating in.

CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
I can definitively say that this is by far and away the most difficult Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game out of the trio. One prime culprit in this department is that the scoring requirements have now reached a point when they are insane. In Philadelphia, the last regular level in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, the sick score was 250,000 points. Now, in the Airport, the sick score is 300,000 points - and that is only about halfway through the game! Neversoft obviously thought that the revert would raise high scores exponentially this time around, but it really does not make all that much of a difference, since reverts are only remotely useful in some situations, and the timing always has to be flawless to pull them off. There is a fine line between making a game difficult and making a game frustrating. Neversoft has crossed that line.

REPLAY VALUE--MEDIUM
I will put it in perspective by saying this: After reaching the Airport level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, I saved my career, shut off my PlayStation 2, booted up the Dreamcast, and spent some time working with my eighth character through Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 will not hold your interest for as long as the other two games. After I have beaten this game and unlocked what there is to unlock, I actually expect to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 more than it, and the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater about the same amount. This is almost solely due to the horrible level designs, although the lack of anything substantial new also affected that prediction. You will still play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 a lot, especially if you are the only person at your school, like myself, who has it and everyone wants to come over and play it. Just do not expect to get as much quality playtime out of it as its predecessors.

PROS
*Graphically the best game in the series, even including the Dreamcast versions.
*The deepest Create-a-Player Mode this side of WWF: Smackdown! 2.
*A new revert mode will make your combos infinitely bigger.

CONS
*The level designs are horrible.
*The soundtrack is getting progressively worse as the series goes on. Del the Funky Homosapien? Come on.
*A much more simplistic level progression system.

CLOSING STATEMENT
Get Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 instead. It has better level designs, more customization options, and is just more fun to play. The only place that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 has it beat is in the depth of the Create-a-Player and Create-a-Skate-Park Modes, and with the addition of the revert. Otherwise, I will take the level designs and different level progression system of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 any day. Creativity is not always the best solution, Neversoft. Sometimes we want levels that actually look like skate parks, not Ronald Reagan National Airport, and the only level in THPS 3 that fits the bill is Skater’s Island.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 does not seem like a finished game. It seems like more of a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.5. This is a game that was rushed out before it was ready for market, because, I suppose, the management at Activision was afraid that the buzz about the series would die off. Well, this game killed more buzz on its own than waiting a few months could have ever hoped to. Nothing important is really new, the levels are poorly designed, they got rid of Bob Burnquist, and they took a giant step backward on the level progression system. The only thing that Neversoft can really do to redeem themselves in my eye is take that currently X-Box exclusive Tony Hawk 2X, and all of the levels included in it, including the five X-Box only levels, all of the levels from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, the hidden levels from previous games in the series, and some more new, well thought out levels, and release ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 Plus’ for consoles across the board. It would not take very much effort, and it would give Neversoft the time and resources needed to make Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 the sequel that THPS 3 should have been. That would be a much more well-rounded game anyway. I always dream of reverting into manuals while coming off of the loop-the-loop in The Bullring.

Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to play some Tony Hawk 2. The third edition can wait a while.

OVERALL--8

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/04/01, Updated 11/04/01