You ever play Tony Hawk's Project 8? I'm talking about the Gen 7 version, the one with the Nail The Trick, Havok bails, and with an artstyle that's very particular. One of my first series on YT that I did by myself is on this game, and it was both a slog and a blast to play.
I see a lot of people focus on the PS1/PS2 era of the Tony Hawk series, which is understandable. That was when it shot Tony Hawk and skateboarding to an all time high, and the games still hold up to this day. My experience with the games was having Tony Hawks' Proving Ground on the DS, which I played a lot of despite me being admittedly crap at first. The quarantine got me to play THPS2 on the Dreamcast, and that's the point where I picked back up the skateboarding habit that I engage in today. I had to grab the entire series, but THP8 was strangely the one that I had the most difficulty in getting. I theorize it's because of being a 'launch' title for the X360 during the age where Microsoft must've used the plans to mass produce Frutiger Easy-Bake Ovens instead.
For Neversoft's New Tony game, it takes some steps forward and a few backward. I don't know how early EA's Skate development was mentioned, but I can tell you now that Nail The Trick (NTT) looks like it was put in because of Activision sweating from finally getting Extreme Sport competition for one of the first times. Tell me if this sound's familiar, you use your thumbstick(s) to move the board however you want, the quicker you flick means the faster the board spins (which means more points) and you have to be precise or else putting your feet back on the board might bail you. The world also goes into slow motion to account for it, and you can also do body varials for multiplier. On paper this sounds good, but in reality it has more usage as either a combo starter or a vert 'super special', which they actually address in the next game with giving you Nail Mechanics that do involve street.
To counteract this flagrant abuse of points along with the old system, some of the point inflation was cut a bit. Specials were untouched, but there no longer is a switch point bonus, some basic tricks have their base point amount cut, and grinding won't give you a crapton of points like the previous games had. There's no rolls, but the flips were changed so you would need to hold the left trigger and up/down to do it, which also makes diagonal grabs a whole lot riskier and more rewarding if you can manage to keep track of your characters direction. Cavemanning also has a bug where rotating your character makes the countdown go FASTER, but I usually utilize it to end a small combo so I could talk to an NPC. Buttslaps are still there if you fancy breaking the game back into a facsimile of it's older counterparts.
The way the game runs also needs special mention, because it is horrid. I played the game without the 30FPS patch because the game flat out is unbearable to play when most of the gameplay is fighting the optimization. This is because the game is properly free-roam, so that means that the boys at Neversoft had to make a way to stream areas that wasn't obvious, while also dealing with a year deadline with constant changes to the game up until mastering. THAW doesn't count, they have Jak loading tunnels and a 'loading screen' when prepping the grafitti menu. My theory on this is from how the map is made, there's always some way to look at the other areas within the horizon, so they have to keep the low def. areas in memory, whilst also preparing to load wherever the player is going to, so imagine having two hi def. chunks in memory while still having to keep the low def. areas to maintain the illusion of an open world. If you go into the School area, which you can tell is split up into chunks because they have the school obscure the portables and the courtyard by the pillar-bridge area, you can feel the moment the X360 is choking on unloading and loading models and data.
Also another contribution to the load is NPC's, they have a flat 30FPS mode when they're far away, and they go into 3D when you're close enough to them. They still have to keep the 3D model at the ready because you are GOING to cruise into them close enough to be 3D rendered. I need to get off of this, but I want to tell whoever is interested how a death by a thousand papercuts bogs the game down. Again, they remedy this by having the next game take place in Philly, which has plenty of tall buildings and open areas to lower the amount of detail needed to load in at once, and NPC's fade into view in such a way where it doesn't take away from the immersion.
Another thing that they added in is ragdolling, which replaces the static set of bails from the old games for a more dynamic version. It's in the weird middle ground where it want's to be realistic but also fun. They give you a button combination to induce bail at any point, and they have goals that require you to either get up in a certain spot or to travel through a certain amount of gates. It's not PAIN for the PS3, because you practically lose all of your speed and height from the first bounce. Coupled with the potential rendering hiccups and questionable force pushes, and instead of an amusing game mechanic it becomes a gimmick that wastes my time (and not in an enjoyable way). My guess is that they decided to make it a game feature after going nuts at trying to make the bails look realistic, but didn't have enough time to tweak it further. Having ragdoll physics was a flex in the game world back then, so I wouldn't blame them for trying to make the best out of it.
The artstyle is something that wouldn't be that important in any other Tony Hawk game, but for some reason this was the one out of every Neversoft era game to make me pause. I can best describe it as realistic with two ball-and-chains forcing it to be some weird diet coke version of underGRADS (and the meddling of MTV remaining the same). The two balls in question being the Boom Boom Sabotage movie and Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. I can only theorize this happening as a compromise from the facial scans of the previous one and having to do environmental studies to make the locations feel grounded enough to excuse it being somehow skatepark worthy. Would you rather choose the hard path of shoelace normal mapping, or go with the stylization of slightly crazy? Last part of this is that the Pros still look uncanny in the engine.
Even with those cons, it's still Tony Hawk at it's core. It's fun to navigate and search for gaps, do whack tricks at the most strangest of places, and even use NTT on purpose. It still has that charm of getting better at the game, and to a point of breaking the game further just to makes some of the more crazier feats possible. It also has some missions where they put it in the classic tony format, as well as some missions that do nail the feeling of just skating because it's fun. The Dustin Dollin/Stevie Williams or the Lyn-Z/Nyjah Huston Pro missions show off that point in it's more true and cheesy moments. I will admit that the setting being in some sort of upside down town is a fun endeavour. There's Dad, who might actually be your father or is just a neighbor undergoing an episode. There's the two real estate agents that are waging war on each other as if it's gang affiliations, and there's a school that's next to the skatepark and a bridge to the Jeep factory area and Slum periphery. The skatepark is also built in the runoff area of the Funpark, and the Skatepark has the only road that a Jeep can drive on that doesn't lead to anywhere. It's dysfunctional in every area, and somehow your love of Skating is the only thing worth seeing and doing.
I wouldn't call this a review, because trying to put the enjoyability of an experience that can change from person to person is kind of a daunting task. I just wanted to record my thoughts on a game that somehow took a lot of my free time for some mystifying reason. The decisions and the behaviors of the game remind me that it was made by human beings, and they just wanted to make a game that was enjoyable and worth buying.
It may not be for the average gamer, or even the average Tony Hawk fan for that matter, it's a game that has it's moments if you take it as it is: an interesting and enjoyable distraction. Also that trying to 100% sick everything on there is a goal for the absolutely crazy people.
