Tony Hawk's Happy Place

By Will Barker

Here I was, thinking the meaning of life was all about finding peace and harmony with one's surroundings. Pondering Buddhist teachings about attaining tranquility, and eating freshly speared manta ray on banana leaves.

Turns out it's far easier to just rig together a mammoth combo involving something called a 'kickflik' and 'rail glide'.

Though you may not have picked it from my impeccable introduction, I haven't played a Tony Hawk game in quite some time. 

Tom Machuca usually does the skating games, but I wanted to give this one a go, to see what's changed since I last played Tony Hawk about three years ago, back in 1987.

Well, Tony Hawk has returned for what - the twenty sixth time? - and there's some cool changes here. It's clear that Neversoft wanted to take the game in a new direction - the name change is significant - and it's achieved this. To a point.

Things like online play, slow motion (nail the trick) moves, improved graphics, and a new progression path for the single player game are all part of the package and elements I've not had the good fortune to experience yet. 

And this time the Hawk is packing heat. 

Available on the buggy, disc-scratching, and altogether awesome next gen consoles - PS3 and Xbox 360 - Tony Hawk has never looked better. The game moves with a fluidity that almost liquefied my eyeballs and vitamised my cerebral cortex, and the visual acuity's not bad either.

Quite right. The graphical detail is crisp and the game world has excellent detail. There is an impressively gritty and realistic feel to some of the areas of the game, and the skaters look pretty swish for the most part. 

Sometimes there's polygon meshing (hands disappear into bodies etc) but overall it's a very well presented game and it's easy to get immersed in your surroundings.

The level design is also pretty good, with plenty of long grinds and connecting set pieces to gain massive combos from. 

The three main areas - Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC are all joined by bridges and tunnels that you have to physically skate between to access, which can be seen as a cool game world nexus, or a tedious and long winded way to get between the three major areas.

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground is being touted as the largest and deepest Hawk game yet, and this claim may well be true. But if you've played all the previous Tony Hawk games you may find that this is just more of the same.

Some people really like that. People like my Aunt Judy, who I would categorise as a consumer 'addict' with a serious mental imbalance. She has more than 60 dog collars and only two dogs.

Okay, fans of the series will want to know what's new. Here's what the game's publisher (Activision) reckons:

Freedom of Play: This works to a point, as you can skate around and do different missions at different times - there's no set structure per se - but I'd hardly call it freedom. Your freedom is restricted to certain areas of the game world until you pass a certain amount of objectives.

Though it does make the digital world feel a touch more real, this talk of 'playing your way' suggests a totally non-linear experience to my way of thinking, which can be misleading.

Guidance From Skate Pros: Okay this one is quite cool. There are three skater types who teach you how to do various missions, like nail the trick or aggro kicks, and whenever you meet a new character you get a short video of them in action which is a cool reward.

The three skater types are Rigger (Rodney Mullen, Bam Margera etc), Career (Tony Hawk, Bob Burnquist etc), and Hardcore (Mike Vallely, Andrew Reynolds etc).

Create Skate Videos: Yeah, this feature is cool, especially if you create a really absurd, slightly malformed looking skater. The amount of visual options you can fiddle around with are extensive. 

The video editing suite allows you to cut and mix different sections of video very effectively, plus you can add your own soundtrack, tool around with different lenses, add special effects, change camera angles - the list goes on. All told, this feature is very powerful and very cool, and you can post them online if you desire.

Seamless Single-to-Multiplayer Gaming: Seamless is an interesting word. Not unlike gastronomy or shuttlecock. Seriously though, you can just skate around in single player and then log on the net and join more people and have a little chat as well. The online aspect increases the game's shelf life by a large margin and can be highly competitive.

Expanded Gameplay Mechanics: Expanded is another interesting word, like pelvic splanchnic ganglion, which is the nerve centre that controls your rectal and renal discharge (or poos and wees as I like to call it). Tony Hawk's Proving Ground adds some new moves, including bowel, sorry, bowl carving which is pretty cool but hard to get the hang of. 

There's also an expanded nail-the-trick repertoire (the semi-intuitive slow motion trick system), which now features nail-the-grab and nail-the-manual. You can also improve your climbing and 'breaking and entering' skills to overcome obstacles and find new areas to skate, plus there's the aggro kick and push, skate checking, and the interesting rig-a-kit feature that allows you change game world and add new rails and ramps.

More Customisation: Yeah, this one is true. You can create a more dynamic skater from scratch, you can use the rig-a-kit feature to change your surroundings and there's also the Skate Lounge aspect. You can create your own pad, complete with furniture and TVs and other related consumerables, which is a nice touch.

Well, there's the new stuff. Some of it's legitimately new, some of it is simply tweaks of the older stuff that was pretty good to begin with. The result of these elements combined does make for a comprehensive game and I had a good time playing it. 

Interestingly, the things that kept me coming back weren't all the jazzy new stuff (though the video editing was cool) so much as the classic gameplay.

The controls are still very solid, allowing you to perform some seriously massive moves (and the flatland tricks are very cool) without too much sweat, combining grinds, manuals, grabs, kickflips, and other moves. Things like the aggro kick, which increase your speed dramatically and allow to jump much larger gaps, also add another layer to the gameplay, as does the bowl carving.

In age old Tony Hawk Pro Skater style, there's also a wide variety of music tracks, old and new, including but not limited to these gems:

Jurassic 5 - "Radio"
Bloc Party - "Version 2.0"
The Clash - "Clash City Rockers"
Beastie Boys - "Electric Worm"
Nirvana - "Breed"
The Rolling Stones - "Sympathy for the Devil"
Foo Fighters - "The Pretender"
The Sex Pistols - "Holidays in the Sun"
Roots Manuva - "Chin High"

For the first time in its almost 10 year history, the Tony Hawk franchise has had to work for its supper. It's never really been challenged by any other games, but now that EA's Skate has hit the scene and is making waves, Neversoft has had to act.

Enter Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, or Tony Hawk 9 if you will. It certainly improves most areas of the game, from the graphics and sound, to the online experience, and the interactivity and realism of the game world. But the gameplay really hasn't changed that much. 

To my mind, this is not necessarily a bad thing but I know there will be gamers out there looking for something new. You will find it here in some aspects, including the Skate Lounge and the awesome video editing suite, and the way your skater evolves depending on what path you take, but if you're looking for something radically innovative I'd say try the demo first.

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground takes the franchise forward another step and provides plenty of gaming happiness during the long and largely satisfying journey to the top. It's an engrossing game with some cool new elements, but the meaning of life? Yes, it answers that question too.

Game: Tony Hawk's Proving Ground
System: Xbox 360
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Activision
Distributor: Neversoft

Rating: 80%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)