Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam

"A Fun, Different take on the Hawk franchise that works"

In my opinion Tony Hawk is very underrated and is often overlooked as a choice when looking for a new Wii game. Downhill Jam is best described as SSX on skateboards. It's fast downhill racing with some wild stunt action.

The game is broken up nicely into different tiers of competition. The first couple of tiers are very easy but by the third tier the challenge ramps up just enough and the game starts getting really good. One thing I like about the difficulty in this game is that it never truly becomes frustrating... everything is within reach and balanced nicely. The competition is split up with downhill racing, trick runs, slalom courses and a few others.

Graphically it's solid and very clean, nothing fancy but it looks good. Character models are nice and animate well. The environments are quite large and very detailed. The intro movie and the videos after completing various goals are not so nice, they're pixely and not very well done.. but really, how often are you going to go back and watch them. Overall though the graphics are solid and get the job done.

The control is spot on, It may take a couple of races to come to grips with it, but once you do it's totally intuitive. The Wiimote is the only control option available but it works very well. Steering is done by turning the remote left or right . The ' A ' button is used for powerslides which give you a speed boost when done right. Tricks are mapped to the 1 and 2 buttons with 1 being used for grinds and flip tricks and 2 covering ollies and grab tricks. There are also advanced controls for wallrides, sticker slaps, spins and special tricks. By doing tricks a boost meter is filled which is activated by giving the remote a quick shake.

Downhill Jam also contains some Tony Hawk standards such as a create a skater mode, unlockable boards and videos, a wide variety of ' cheat ' codes and an incredibly awesome soundtrack covering some of the best rock, punk, metal and rap with a couple of surprises thrown in for good measure.

As long as you know you're not getting a traditional Tony Hawk game but a totally different take on the skateboard game genre you won't be disappointed. The game is incredibly fun with tons of replay. In my opinion the game deserves a high 7/10 and is a very worthy game to add to your Wii game library.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/09/07