"An all new low for the series"

Tony Hawk started the extreme gaming crazy. The original was a great game, the sequel was heavily flawed. The third one was much better, the fourth was a let down and didn't even live up to Agressive Inline, a game that came out months before Tony Hawk 4. Now with the fifth game in the series, it's clear Tony has not only lost steam but respect for all gamers.

The new addition this year is story mode. Now, I will give Neversoft credit for trying this but my god, it's worse than a soap opera. It starts off with you wanting to become a pro. Simple enough, but then your friend ends up getting the local drug dealers after him and off to New York you go. It only gets worse from there. Not only that but the game is full of pointless cussing and racial slurs, something that isn't needed in games at all.

The control is simple to get the hang of. Too simple perhaps because I was busting out huge combos right from the start. Of course once your stats start to raise it's hard to turn because you starting moving really fast right from the start. Tricks are easy to bust out and you're given a trick list in the options menu in case you don't know how to pull off certain moves. ALso, during goals that require certain moves, it tells you on the screen how to do them.

The graphics have steadily improved with the series. This isn't the case here. The levels may be bigger and full of more objects but they look so bland with very few actual details to locations. This is probably the biggest disappointment for me. They are far from horrible but in the end they just come off as bland and uninteresting due to the lack of detail.

The sound has always been a mixed bag. Now we get horrid sound effects when you fail a goal. Throw in some of the worst music to grace a video game and you're in for some pain. The good thing about the music is you can turn off a specific genre or you can turn off the songs you don't like. Sadly, the game doesn't feature the custom soundtrack option that can be found in the XBOX version.

The gameplay is basicly the same. You now have story levels. Each having about 5 goals. You only need to beat 3 to advance to the final goal of the level and move onto the next. Of course, to be unique, you can now drive cars in some missions and you can go on foot whenever you want and climb onto objects... Yes, it's as bad as it sounds. Gone is the pure skateboardign fun and now it's slowly turning into a mindless platformer, item colelcting included! The goals are pretty lame, drive through cones, collect junk to make ramp, score certain amount of points, impress so and so. Nothing new. Online play and multiplayer is here. Personally, I didn't feel like dealing with them, I'm sure they are the same as before, maybe a new mode thrown in or something. Another new feature is the ability to take a picture with a camera, email it to neversoft and get a code to insert your face into the game. Nice feature and it's only on the PS2 version, I didn't bother with it either but people have said it works. It's nice to have all of these new features and options but the previous games also offered most of the stuff like create a park and skater and I actually feel that the create a skater option in this one is pretty weak besides the picture thing.

The replay value can be either high or low. To unlock everything you need to beat the game on each setting. Game is short too so that shouldn't take long. Personally, if you've played the others, you've pretty much played this one before. If you have some friends who aren't sick of the series then perhaps it's worth getting because of that but my friends don't care for the series and while the online play in previous games was good, I doubt I would care for it in this one since I didn't like any of the levels.

Personaly, I'm done with the Tony hawk series and you won't be seeing any more reviews of this series from me. The series has slowly gone down hill and the fact that the dialog in this game is so crude and racist at times, I refuse to support anything Neversoft puts out after this game. Maybe some people liked the crude language but I felt it wasn't needed on any level, this isn't Grand Theft Auto!

Control: 8
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 5
Replay value: 8
Sound: 4
Story: 4

Final Score: 4

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/31/03