It’s been more than eight years since Neversoft released the first Tony Hawk game, and the ninth iteration, Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, just hit retail. But does the popular franchise maintain its footing against the competition?
Skateboarding fans have long looked to the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series of games for its smart recreation of the skating aesthetic and addictive, arcade-style gameplay. But for the first time in the series’ history, it faces some serious competition from skate., Electronic Arts’ first major foray into the skateboarding genre.
The verdict? Hawk took a major bail on this one.
My initial impressions weren’t so dire. I was immediately impressed by the slick interface and its striking duotone theme. Menus zoom and flash between one another while punk, rock and hip-hop music flesh out the feeling. It looks like a Tony Hawk game, no question.
But unfortunately, the Tony Hawk feel isn’t quite there anymore. The game’s biggest selling point this time around is the emphasis on skater specialization. Players can choose to be a big-money career skater, a hardcore thrasher or a do-it-yourself rigger who makes his own skate park wherever the player sees fit. Essentially, Neversoft is cleverly tying together the old elements of skate park creation and classic, points-based challenges and integrating them with the unconventional goals and crass humor of the most recent Tony Hawk games.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is fundamentally flawed. Despite the inclusion of three different career paths, none of them is compelling enough to play. Goals are unbalanced, ranging from very easy to break-your-controller difficult. The game’s strength has always been in its strong sense of momentum – starting a run from slow, basic tricks to nailing crazy air and long lines of stunts. Without a series of clearly defined and accessible goals, the gameplay becomes uneven and jarring.
There are some seriously confusing design choices that made the game all the more frustrating to play. Proving Ground includes the standard Create-a-Skater mode, but inexplicably lacks the ability to create a female skater. It seems bizarre for a game to still cater so exclusively to males when most every other video game with character creation elements (Oblivion, Mass Effect and Rock Band, to name a few) represent both sexes.
The new video editing function is accessible, but frustratingly limited. After performing a series of tricks, the player can save a video and edit angles, effects and cuts later. It’s fun, and worth trying out, but it’s easily outclassed by skate.’s better-looking graphics engine and its ability to share actual video files that can be viewed from a computer.
Pro skaters reprise their roles as simple quest-givers and signposts. Their voices sound stilted, one of the downsides of hiring skaters, not actors, to do the voiceovers. And the fact that they’re all slumming around Philadelphia waiting for your no-name skater to come by and become the greatest is a pretty thin premise with which to work.
As if Activision wasn’t profiting enough from the Tony Hawk franchise already, Proving Ground includes an obscene number of product placements. Posters for Guitar Hero III and other games are smeared liberally across the gritty urban locales. Advertising in games is only successful when it doesn’t interrupt the play experience; unfortunately, Proving Ground’s ads are painfully blatant.
Neversoft needs to recognize that its time-honored formula of skating gameplay has gone stale, and that without some serious innovation the series is doomed to fall deeper into insignificance and, eventually, right into a bargain bin. Skateboarding fans are advised to check out skate., and to steer clear from Hawk’s latest debacle.
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