Tony Hawk's Underground : Games : Web Wombat

Punk rock, ratty sneakers, crazy safety-gear-not-included feats of daring/stupidity while flying across the parking-lot bitumen poised on a plank with wheels bolted on.

This is skateboarding at its most grungy, several times removed from the freshly-polished half pipes and Globe sponsorship of the pro-skating scene.

Here, there are no Tony Hawks, no Kareem Campbells, no illusions; there is nothing to believe in except what happens between the time your board hits the road and the time you leave it flying through the air, seconds away from a head-cracking impact with a power pole.

The latest in the Tony Hawk skating series from seasoned game house Neversoft, Underground is, like its predecessors, more of the same, but with sufficiently different styling that the fact no new ground is broken matters not a mite.

In the words of one famous deckchair philosopher, metaphorical daiquiri in hand, "it's all good".

Apparently taking cues from the skating doco 'Dogtown and Z-Boys', Neversoft have gone back to the beginning, dropping your ability to pick from the pros an avatar, instead letting you play out the game as a customisable skating hopeful in the suburbia of a backwater town somewhere in Middle America.

This may seem a little strange, what with the game sporting the big fat 'Tony Hawk' label and all, but bear with me.

The Half Life 2 delay wasn't due to stolen
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You, lowly ghetto rat that you are, must get sponsorship from a skate shop, help get your mate's board back from the local smackhead gangstas and impress a passing skating identity.

You'll also have to leap a gigantic bridge with the help of what looks like a WRX, break into a train station whilst abusing the oversized rent-a-cop outside…and generally do all manner of illegal or at least seriously whacked things in your quest to get to the top of the skating world.

Utilising the cut scenes and extra interactivity of Tony Hawk 4's revamped engine, Tony Hawk: Underground, or THUG (gotta love that acronym), is always fresh in every way that counts, so that just when you think you've done everything there is to do, something pops up to surprise you.

I'm not going to go in-depth with the gameplay descriptions, because the odds are definitely in my favour that you've all played a Tony Hawk game before, because if you haven't you are either dead or have been living in a small cave in the jungles of Cambodia for the last ten years…most likely both.

Suffice to say that combos, flips, grinds, grabs, transfers, switches and manuals are involved, and linking these many tricks is the key to racking up monster scores.

Also, for the first time, Neversoft have implemented the ability to actually jump off your board and freestyle about on foot.

The old front-side tailslide - loved by all and sundry

Rather than being a novelty, this ability becomes integral later on in the game when it comes to completing the toughest of the tough missions.

Moving on…'Pretty but never stunning' is the best way to describe THUG graphically, with not all that many improvements over the Hawkmeister's last outing.

I will say that the mo-cap animation featured is some of the best I've ever seen though, particularly when you overstep your mark on a grind and get it in the fork or misjudge a gap and seemingly break everything there is to break, board included, in a bone-shattering collision with the concrete.

Ow! It certainly makes you cringe, let me tell you.

As with all the Hawk games, everything in the sonic department is second-to-none, and the soundtrack is particularly worthy of note.

The bands ranging from KISS to Jane's Addiction, Queens of the Stone Age, Nas, Jurassic 5, The Clash, NOFX and the Rubber City Rebels bringing their various talents to the aural table, for a total of 75 tracks, which is definitely a series high and is slightly more than double the number of songs featured in TH4.

The only criticism I can level at THUG is that it is, after all, more of the same - and that maybe it would be wise for Neversoft to move on now, at the height of their power, rather than hang around and milk this franchise dry.

Then again, all of us wannabe skaters can't get enough of this stuff, so bring on Tony Hawk 5!

Game: Tony Hawk's Underground
System: Xbox
Players: 1-2
Online: Yes
Developer: Neversoft
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Tony Hawk's Underground is on the shelves now.

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