Tony Hawk's Project 8

"If this were a school project, I’d give it a B-."

Tony Hawk games are fun, but they've been in a rut as of late. While the most recent iterations, such as Underground 2 and American Wasteland, have been less than stellar, Neversoft promised to reform the series by revamping the engine for the next-gen consoles. As you may have seen or heard, the game engine has been completely redone from the ground-up and the graphics are gleaming with high-res texture goodness and a nice polygon count. Many problems in the series have been corrected, but Neversoft has chosen to ignore a few of them and even create a new laundry list of new problems in the process.

Start up the game and you're granted access to the standard TH fare. You can check out the Career, Free Skate, Xbox Live play, etc. However, Career mode, once again, becomes mandatory to unlock new places to skate as well as new skaters, decks, and other collectibles. This time around, the story has no fluff in it—Tony Hawk visits “Skateboarding Town,” a small town full of skateboarders. He's getting together a skate team consisting of only EIGHT skateboarders, and you, the generic custom skateboarder, must get on his team by completing all sorts of goofy tasks and, via Tony's imaginary computer database, are you able to move up in the ranks. You'll run into several goofy townspeople, such as disgruntled real estate agents, school mascots, security guards, and construction workers. There's even the usual cast of pro skateboarders who show up and challenge you to push your skateboarding abilities to the limit.

Probably the biggest nuisance is the lack of Create-a-Skater options. You may only choose from three existing “classes” of skateboarders (the punk, the guy in the hoodie, etc.) and from there are you able to deck him or her out with shirts, jeans, shoes, etc. The number of clothing items is surprisingly limited this time around too, but you'll eventually get yourself a skateboarder together you can tolerate. Saving your skater is easy, so you can save your progress as well as your looks with ease.

The world of Project 8 takes place in a fairly large, spread-out town that is split up into segments; Suburbia, the skate park, the school, the factory, the slums, etc. All in all, the town is pretty impressive and is miles ahead of the “free-roaming” mess that was Los Angeles from American Wasteland. Sections of the town aren't connected merely by tunnels but by entire segments pasted right next to each other, and the load times are non-existent, albeit some mild lag that occurs during the streaming environments. At first, this whole city sounds mind-blowing, but it loses a bit of its innovativeness once you've considered the levels aren't so original. Suburbia? Wasn't that from THPS3? What about the school? The generic skate park? Also, the city does suffer from a bit of “Urbanitis,” which left THUG2 and THAW with many boring, uncreative skateboarding environments. Add that to the fact that there's no Create-a-Park option and you're forced to skate around town. Thankfully, the city is not all that bad, but I found it lacking when compared to the stellar environments of THPS2/3/4.

To those who grew weary of the erroneous skateboarding engine of THAW, padded with all sorts of useless moves, Neversoft cleaned up the game engine and removed some of the useless stuff, such as the parkour and burt slides. Thankfully, the whole "grind-manual-flip trick" formula is still intact. The skateboarding looks brand new and the new trick animations have been revamped to look a lot more realistic. However, right away, I noticed that the engine has been changed, thus the game handles differently. Executing tricks is a bit of a pain since you're now forced to use the joystick and the tricks are a tad bit unresponsive. 180 Spin Taps, a feature that some may have grown accustomed to from the previous games, are no longer here. All in all, the skateboarder feels more bulky this time around, as opposed to the more “flexible” skating from previous TH games.

Okay, so there's always the “get used to it” element that will probably have readers cursing at me and my incompetence, but why that should be the case when the controls were already fine “as is” is absurd. In previous TH games, I had no trouble getting at least a few million points per run. Now it's incredibly frustrating to get at least a half a million in the same amount of time. TH vets expecting to pick up this game and start getting million-point combos may or may not be disappointed.

Moving on to the Career mode, it's in lieu style of old TH games. Skate around and talk to people to do tasks. The compass on your screen will lead you in the general direction of all the people who are just DYING to ask you to do stuff. Tasks aren't really that new this time around; you'll be asked to do basic stuff such as tricks for a photo shoot, big combos for a skate demo, and tricky lines just for kicks. Even more innovative are the classic TH listed tasks, crammed into one single goal. Here, you're collecting the Skate and Combo letters as well as getting high scores in two-minute runs, and these goals will leave you with a sense of euphoria, considering collecting the same old Skate letters around a skate park never gets old.

There's at least 150 goals in the game and by completing them, you'll unlock new places to skate and boost your skater's rank. Tied into the rank are the three difficulties per goal, which accommodates for beginners and experts alike. Sure, you can merely beat every goal on the easiest level and get to Rank 8 easily, but you can up the ante by completing the goals on Pro or Sick levels, hereby boosting your skater to Rank 4 or even the coveted Rank 1. Sure, it's optional, but these Sick goals are pretty hard, even for more TH veterans.

Aside from the goals, you can free-skate around town. Another new, but innovative goal mode involves hitting specific lines around town. For instance, you can grind around the block and beat the goal on Easy, but you can grind for two blocks and get the Pro goal, or three for the Sick goal. You can do tricks for pedestrians and gain “Stokens,” the game's currency which can be spent on new clothing and skating gear at the store. You can also spray rival skater's tags and collect CDs in hard-to-reach locations in order to unlock new items and whatnot. By free-skating, you can also gain stat points, which are handed out in a timely, yet acceptable fashion.

Probably the newest and most critically acclaimed feature is the Nail the Trick mode. Basically, when skateboarding, the game will slow down and zoom in on the skateboarder's feet. By using the two joysticks, you can control the skater's feet and kick the board as you please. This mode is not that easy, since right timing is required or else the skater will kiss the pavement. Nail the Trick is a pretty good idea, but it's moreso a gimmick since it's not required except to complete a few goals, plus it feels more like a minigame than an actual “new trick,” as opposed to the advent of spine transfers from THPS4.

Another “cool” feature is the rag-doll physics. Upon bailing, your skater will flop around like an idiot and gain a “hospital bill” in the process. It's a minigame that measures how much damage you've done to the skater's head, chest, legs. It's fun for a while, but soon enough, it becomes too ridiculous. On several occasions, the skateboarder will defy gravity by flying in an unexpected direction in a floaty manner. It doesn't help that Project 8 also forces a few goals using the rag-doll physics, such as throwing your skater at a couple of bowling pins or launching him two-hundred feet into the air, only to land on the concrete floor below. If you've played the Insurance Fraud missions from Saints' Row, you'll notice a bit of a mindless resemblance that, while humourous for a while, eventually gets stale.

Aside the Career mode, there's the usual Free Skate and Xbox Live modes. Nothing is amiss here—the modes are fundamentally the same as previous iterations. Trick Attack is the most rudimentary mode in which players skate for the highest score before time runs out. Skateboarding by yourself or with friends is enjoyable but somewhat stunted by the control problems. However, the pile of problems that have plagued the Career mode are still present, so you'll be forced to skateboard around the town with the daunting controls. It's pretty cool that you can enter Nail the Trick or Focus mode (which both slow down the game) even in multiplayer, and the game will compensate for the slowdown just fine.

At least Project 8 have taken a pretty big visual step up from American Wasteland. The game looks pretty next-gen; the character models are pretty sharp and the environments are pretty detailed. The new trick animations are not disappointing at all. Cutscenes in which individuals ask you to do tasks are really nice, as opposed to the meager animated models of the old days. However, I've had a couple of problems, particularly with the contrast at times. For instance, the lighting effects make the environment look too “pasty” at times and slightly unattractive. Also, I also gave my skateboarder a pair of jeans, but from a certain angle, I could've sworn someone threw-up on them. Yeah, I know that sounds weird. Overall, this game looks really good, but still, it feels like something's amiss that keeps it from capturing the perfect radiance of a next-gen game.

Soundwise, the game delivers as well. To accommodate the new trick animations, the sound effects, consisting of “khak” board kicks and “ksshh” grinds, give the skateboarding a bit more depth. The voice-overs from pro skateboarders and generic pedestrians are a step-up above THAW's generic phoned-in lines. As for the soundtrack, there's nothing new or revolutionary this time—just a lot of random punk, rap, and rock tunes that you've come to expect from the series. However, it's got Wolfmother's “Woman,” which is one of those rare songs that manages to annoy me to death. Okay, so that's an exaggeration, because we all know the most annoying music ever is the soundtrack to Disney's "Oliver and Company," or maybe every song from the hip and cool Shrek movies. Still, I promise I won't reduce the score over it.

Tony Hawk's Project 8 upgrades the series to next-gen and it looks great. However, the core of the gameplay—the skateboarding—is a mixed bag that, while it doesn't sink the game, keeps it from being as fun as the old Tony Hawk games from the past. Also, the Career mode is still fairly unoriginal, plus a lot of new features, such as the Nail the Trick mode, don't really carry the weight that the box says they do. It's still a fun game, but one that could be improved on greatly.

Presentation: 8/10 – Love the intro movie. Menus are kind of bland though.
Gameplay: 6/10 – New skateboarding controls change up the time-endured TH gameplay too much. New features such as the free-roaming city and Nail the Trick mode are good but don't lift up the experience that much.
Graphics: 8/10 – New trick animations and well-detailed characters and environments. Lighting, however, lacks that special oomph.
Sound: 8/10 – Satisfactory skateboarding sound effects, voice-overs, and soundtrack.
Replay Value: 7/10 – Career mode is fairly vast, but it may become boring too soon. The vast city only lasts for so long, but online play keeps the experience going for a while.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/22/07, Updated 07/09/09

Game Release: Tony Hawk's Project 8 (US, 11/07/06)