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Tony Hawks Underground Review |
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Tony Hawks Underground
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It's finally arrived, the fifth installment of the Tony Hawk's Pro skater series; THPS Underground. Ever since the original, THPS has dominated the skateboarding game industry, making vast improvements on each new release and allowing no room for any of the competition to breathe. To be honest with you I was hoping that this game wouldn't be very good, even though I've played the previous four games to death and loved all of them, I was hoping this one might not do as well and someone else might get a chance to make a new skating game. Not this time, Underground is just about perfect, it takes all of the advancements we saw in Tony 4 and then brings it to a new level.
This installment of the series is different from in the others, in regards to the game being played as a story instead of just random missions. The idea behind it is that you start off as a kid from New Jersey just skating on the streets around the neighborhood, and as you complete missions you work your way up to the amateur and pro ranks of skating. As you progress you'll have to find a sponsor and join a professional skating team, as well as create a team of your own, picking a custom list of pro skaters to join your team and help you skate in tournaments. This scheme was a smart move, THPS was the king of game play but seemed to be missing the story / character aspect, which it captured perfectly in this game.
Whenever a new THPS game comes out there's always been a defining new game play aspect that comes with it. For example the ability to do a manual in THPS2, or the revert that came later which allowed for the player to link bigger tricks together. Well there are a couple new features that allow for a more broad ability to link tricks together in ways that were not before possible. The first and most important is the caveman, in this game you can actually jump off the board in mid combo, and if you jump back into a trick within a certain amount of time the points link together. Although, you don't have to be in the middle of a trick to get off the board, you can get off the board whenever you like, and jump and grab onto the roofs of buildings and pull yourself up to get to spots that would otherwise be unreachable. Another new combo linking trick is the wall plant, the game now offers the ability to jump into a wall, then kick off it and land back into a trick. There are also several other smaller improvements on trick linking within the game, none of which are as important as the two stated above, they just shape and form the game that much closer to perfection.
Ever since THPS3 the “create a skater” option has become a huge part of the game, with a vast amount of clothes, hair styles, tattoos, and decks. The bank of options has increased even more, with so many options to choose from while creating a skater it's getting impossible to ever see two that are exactly alike. Of course the “create a park” portion of the game exists too, and like create a skater feature the ability to create your own levels keeps getting more advanced and worth while. The newest addition however is the “create a trick” which allows you to build a custom trick from scratch just the way you want it. It's a little hard to explain how it works, there's a linear bar in which you can place several different types of moves together so that they develop into one trick. This is probably the second best development in the game second only to the ability to get off your board. Creating, naming, and performing custom tricks was the next logical step for THPS to take, and was developed just right.
As far as the missions go there isn't a whole lot of breakthrough content, expect to do the usual THPS challenges; collect X amount of objects, do this trick, get this many points doing this, and so on. There are however a few missions that require you to drive a vehicle to complete, while the physics of these vehicles is nowhere near perfect, or in some cases good, it's still nice to see something new. I do however believe that the vehicle in the hidden level is rather well created, but the others are in serious need of improvement.
The levels are probably the best that have been created to date, they're larger, more complex, and more detailed. The levels are definitely the best looking that have been created, the skyscrapers in big cities look fantastic, as well as the background scenery. The graphics are great, when the improved graphics, levels, and game play come together the end product is the best yet of the THPS series. There has yet to be a Tony Hawk game that didn't make a dramatic improvement in game play and graphics, and this holds true with Underground. I've just one last word of advice, if you think you've mastered the earlier versions of THPS, don't start on normal difficulty, go straight to sick or the game might not be as fun.
Visit the official T.H.U.G website here!
Review By: Travis Parrott
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