Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

"Decent followup in a great series"

Tony Hawk 3 provides a good follow up to a great series, with gameplay that's familiar to THPS vets and a few changes to spice it up a bit.

The change being talked about the most is the addition of the revert. I've seen people claim that it's difficult to do and requires perfect timing, but I was able to throw it off when I wanted to within about 2 minutes of trying to use it, so I can't really understand the complaints.

The revert's use is to allow combos to continue when you come down from a vert trick on a quarter pipe. It sounds a little unbalancing at first, but in conjunction with the harsher manual and rail balance (as I've perceived it), it's not quite so bad. A lot of people think about it as just allowing people to string bunches of vert tricks together, which it does, but it's more useful to mix things up in your combo so you don't devalue your grinds and flips too much. As far as gameplay balance goes, I see the revert not as allowing vert to come in (as the talented THPS player could integrate vert into combos in THPS2), but making lip tricks finally have a point. Long have I lamented how useless lip tricks were in this series, and you can finally use them effectively and easily in combos, which really helps when you have problems devaluing your grabs and specials.

The other big addition in this game is more flatland tricks and transitions from flatland to flatland, grind to grind, and lip trick to lip trick without ollies. For instance, you can do an Anti-Casper, transition it to a casper, to a casper flip, to a handstand, to a handflip, etc. Likewise, you can go from a 50-50 grind to a nosegrind to a nosebluntslide to a crooked grind without ollieing. While I was pretty skeptical about flatland stuff at first, it actually can really rack up the points if utilized well.

This system is also somewhat utilized with flips and grabs. You can do double and triple kickflips, heelflips, and impossibles by holding the direction and tapping the square button 2 or 3 times.

The levels are arguably better than the levels in THPS2. The Foundry (the first level) is much larger than the hangar was, the competition levels are pretty comparable (Skater Island, the second competition, is particularly good. It works well for multiplayer with both trick attack and graffiti). The last level really is what makes the biggest difference, though. The Cruise Ship is just amazing, with fantastic grind and vert possibilities. I was admittedly a little disappointed, as I was expecting the levels to be comparable in size to Dave Mirra 2, which they are definitely not (with the possible exception of the cruise ship). However, they are much more refined with much better lines and transfers.

Now we get to what could be the biggest feature in the game, depending on your perspective. Tony Hawk 3 has network play, which works right now with USB Ethernet adapters. The network play is fantastic. High latency and low bandwidth don't seem to bother it much (though I've gotten occasional disconnects), as I use it on a 56k dialup and have played on servers on the opposite coast with 600ms pings just fine. There are a few problems which should be pointed out, though. First and foremost is the fact that in order for games to be started, the person hosting the game has to manually start it. Until that happens, you just free skate around. This means that people can't really run unattended servers, unless all they want is free skate. Second is the fact that it seems to have a 4 player limit on network games, which is kind of disappointing. Finally, I don't believe that you can use created skateparks from the park editor online, which would have been a nice feature.

All in all, Tony Hawk 3 is an admirable addition to the Tony Hawk franchise. It's not groundbreaking, but it keeps up the tradition and adds enough stuff to be worthwhile. The network play may be the biggest determining factor, as if you're willing to lay out another 40$ or so for a USB Ethernet adapter or modem, you'll definitely get a much richer gameplay experience with far more replayability.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/05/01, Updated 11/05/01