Tony Hawk's Underground 2

"THPS+Jackass= Great game"

So every year Neversoft works their asses off to deliver us a new, great Tony Hawk game. And this year delivered mixed results. There has been new gameplay elements added at the expense of less pros involved.

Gameplay 10/10
As always, the gameplay is solid and great. No extreme changes to the controls, other than a few new additions. The focus, being the major one. This is a mixed bag of sorts. On the positive side, it slows everything down and lets you carry out longer combos. On the negative side, it only lasts 15 seconds, depends on your special meter, and the camera angle sucks... horribly. Then there's the grafitti. Now just to address this, thanks to this new feature, there is no longer a create-a-deck option and you can only use your grafitti tag as your board. So that REALLY blows. And finally there's the freak out. It's a fairly useful tool. Give you up to 4,000 points to restart a combo. Not too shabby to start a combo with. But now on to the cream filled part of the game. There are 2 modes of single player gameplay. Story mode and classic mode. Most fans of THUG will go to the story mode, most fans of the older games will go to classic. Each has its ups and downs. Story mode is very solid, with a very simple story line. Team Bam vs. Team Hawk, winner gets a great time, loser pays for the trip. But it becomes a bit more complicated after a while, but I won't delve into details. But there are 7 levels, all of them new. Each of them have 4 sets of goals. Your goals, pro goals, guest goals, and secret goals, totalling about 150 goals in the game. The levels can contain some humorous scenarios and some humorous secret characters, but if I told you, that would spoil the fun part of the game. But on to classic mode. This mode is a lot more solid than Story Mode, but I found it much easier and faster than Story Mode. Now that you can get off your board, it took a lot of the challenge out. I think they should've just taken out all the new mechanics and left the old ones intact. But other than that, I found it very enjoyable.

Controls 9/10
I know most of you must be wondering why this was given a nine instead of a ten. The controls got on my nerves for one reason... the Nollie/Pressure controls. Now you have to hold the button to keep it in Nollie/Pressure. But other than that, the controls were pretty solid.

Sound 10/10
The sound is great. I found the soundtrack very entertaining, and the pro's voiceovers are authentic and the other various sounds are still great.

Replay Value 10/10
With the free roaming being emphasized in this game and online play, this will employ great replay value. And then if you finish Classic or Story Mode, you can finish the other! This game is VERY replayable and on top of that, it has varying difficulties and you can turn off the manual, walking, reverts, and all that to try and challenge yourself even further.

Presentation 10/10
The presentation is great. The menu screens are very attractive, but what I miss is the customization of your score bar like in THUG. But I can live without it.

Graphics 10/10
The art style has changed drastically in this game. It has become more cartoony, due to the nature of the game. But I just can't believe how far this game has come graphics wise. I remember back in the day when I was playing the Pizza Hut demo of THPS and the graphics were just horrible, and look at them now. They're great.

Create-A-Skater 10/10
I just had to give CAS its own category. It is great this year. They have pre made shirts from companies such as Hurley, Volcom, and Nixon, and have a much wider selection of clothing. There are just huge amounts of clothing to pick from. It's just incredible how far the CAS engine has come since THPS2. All the categories have been expanded immensely and lead to more customization of your character. I think it's all downhill from here for the CAS engine. Unless they do a lot more, this is just gonna go downhill for the next 11 THPS games left in the series.

Overall 9/10
I know I've given THPS4 and THUG perfect scores, but I just can bring it to myself to give this a 10/10. This is a great game, however. I think that if the nollie/pressure controls hadn't been like they were, it would be perfect. But overall, it's a great game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/14/04