I've been a fan of the Tony Hawk games ever since I played the first one way back in '99. What made the games so good was that there was a huge selection of tricks to perform and mold them into combos, which was fun and totally bada*s back in the day. Four some years later, the franchise is still running in
Madden NFL fashion with a new game coming out each year totally blowing its predecessor out of the water each year. Well, last year's game was fabulous and when I heard word that the boys (and girls) at Neversoft had started work on another TH game I knew they could not upstage
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4…well, I was wrong. Not only is
Tony Hawk's Underground (
THUG) incredible, but it may be one of the best entries in the whole series, but it's also the most different and that might throw some fans off track.
Instead of picking a popular skater to start and finish the game with like they have done in past games, the developers encourage you to create your own skater that looks most like yourself (or send in your picture so they could mold your face into your own character through online tampering!) and go through the story mode. Yep, it's called "story mode" and although most extreme games with story lines suck (cough, cough,
Airblade, cough, cough), this one's actually good! Okay, your custom made character (who hopefully is named after yourself) is a skateboarding dude living in New Jersey waiting for his lucky break to become rich and famous when he gets a chance to get a sponsor. This chance starts Jason's journey of becoming the best skateboarder and eventually joining a skating team.
This open-ended gameplay is wonderful and is probably one of the best ideas created by Neversoft since the deletion of the restraining time limit that plagued past games. And did I tell you that you're not limited to just your skateboard! You can now drive cars as well as jump of your board, run around, and dare I say it, jump on ledges! This is more like sort of a platform game than an extreme skateboarding one! Okay, well maybe not, but you get what I'm talking about. You travel to many different cities like Tampa Bay and New York getting goals from people on the street. These people will give you a mission like collecting something or pull off a trick over an object. You'd think after so long of doing goals, some would get repetitive, but they are all fresh and pretty humorous at times. A cop might ask you to collect some donuts for him and his boys while one of your roadies requests that you go and find some of your teammates that got "wasted" and lost after a party the night before. These challenges have a lot of variety, but they aren't challenging at all. In one goal you're assigned to in the game, you have to skitch (grab the back of) a dog's tail and have it run around for five seconds in order to complete the mission. Sorry, Neversoft, but I've had harder time taking a crap in the middle of playing this game. Next year, I hope the game will be slightly more difficult because it's ludicrous how easy it is farther into the game. Even when you switch difficulties (there's very easy, easy, normal, hard, and very hard I think) it's still fairly easy until you get to "very hard".
As you skate and do tricks and stuff, you gradually have your stats increased in a way so genius that I'm surprised Neversoft didn't think of it sooner. If you grind a lot or do a lot of manuals, your stats in that area will increase and the same happens when you get big air on a quarter pipe or doing flip tricks often. When you get a little ways in the game, you get a sponsor and get to join a skate team of your choice whether it's a Birdhouse skate team or an Element one, but being a Zero kind of guy I always ride Zero boards. And these supplies are all
free! You can have any decks you want with any design you want and you can even create your own deck with a nifty mode. Speaking of inventing things, there's a new function you can do in
THUG never before seen in an extreme sports game of this type: you can create your own goddamn trick. Holy crap this mode is fun! I can't begin to tell you how many countless hours I spent on creating my own specials. You basically have a grid and you can add as many spins, grabs, or flips as you want and then preview it and there's nothing finer than doing a Twisty-McHaskins-5000 (basically a McTwist, but will a sack tap in between). You can even decide how much your trick will go for when you bust it out! I also have to mention how deep the Create A Skater mode is this year! You can create your person in so much detail, that it will stun you! You can add so many accessories like sunglasses, hats, and casts along with Mohawks, clown shoes, or maybe even spiked hair. And the possibilities are endless when you unlock more things to help you create your skater! If you go halfway through the game and decide you hate the way your skate looks, make him/her look different! You can change the appearance any time you want!
What I've loved about the TH games is the awesome soundtracks they boast. In the past, they've had such awesome bands like Swingin' Utters, Flogging Molly, Lagwagon, The Distillers, and even Dead Kennedys, but this year the soundtrack just blows! Sure, you have some good songs by Kiss, The Offspring, NOFX, Bad Religion, Queens Of The Stone Age, and The Clash, but they are outnumbered on the games almost 80 song soundtrack by such crappy bands like Sublime, Stiff Little Fingers, Alkaline Trio, and Authority Zero! And talk about rap music! I don't like rap too much (aside from some really good underground rappers), but there is a pretty decent variety of hip hop songs from such people like Nas, Jurassic 5, Juggaknots, and Cannibal Ox. Thankfully you can easily edit the play list on
THUG to all the tracks you love in three different categories, but that's just not enough. The soundtrack this year sucks. But aside from the soundtrack, the sound is a definite positive with expert voice acting (from real life skaters themselves like Tony Hawk, Bucky Lasek, Chad Muska along with newbies to the series like Mike Valley, Paul Rodriguez, and Arto Saari) and very well done sound effects that were recorded straight from a skate park. Again, each grind makes a wickedly realistic sound, but something new is the way that the wheels of your board scratch against the pavement.
Something that annoyed me while playing the game was how much advertising there was scattered throughout the game. Adio, Birdhouse, DC, and other skate brands were advertised so much that I started to wonder how much these guys at Neversoft and Activision were being paid for having these guys' ads in their game as well as the actual deck brands like Element and Zero were paying the game makers. I hate when games do this because it's so annoying, but at least they're getting paid and that's all that matters. Another thing that was actually pretty weird is how difficult it is to fall. Halfway through the game I discovered that I hadn't fell or biffed it yet so I tried for about ten minutes to like grinding until I fell or doing a special trick just by jumping and magically I'd land it each time, which made me think that maybe it was a glitch, but I can never tell these days. This makes the game even easier along with the fact that the special meter is easy to fill up…a little too easy, but that's a story for another day! Also, before I forget, let me tell you how much cussing there is in this game. This marks the first installment where the game actually cusses with a lot of four-letter words like damn, hell, sh!t along with a three letter word known as "a*s" and they even say my favorite word: "bastard". A lot of it is gratuitous, which annoys me even more because the people are looking for shock value, but the first time I heard Bam Margera say "bullsh!t" I was deeply surprised. And the game also has some mock-
Grand Theft Auto III vibe to it, which you'll realize as you play the game.
The graphics in
THUG surprisingly remain the same as they were in
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. Sure, the textures may be slightly better as well as the character animations, but everything's basically normal and untouched. The graphics run smooth at a nice frame rate even when there is a lot happening onscreen, but I did see a few drops later into the game. The trick animations are just fabulous. Even when you're doing a million tricks at a time you can still see all of them being performed even if they are going really fast and they move as realistic as ever. The interface of the game was also left unchanged like the special meter and font that's used in displaying the tricks that you do. As for the controls, well, this
is a Tony Hawk game so you can expect super tight controls, bro! The controls are so perfect that you will be nailing a huge combo in the first five minutes—I guarantee it! As for the levels, they remain at the same size except there's one level in the game that's the largest. You'd think that levels would be humongous after last years installment, but they remain the same. Controls don't get better than this! The camera mostly stays behind you, but there are certain times in the game where they get really rowdy and you can barely see around you and the camera-angle-move-around button locks up. You basically use the triangle button to grind, the circle button to pull off grab tricks, and press the square button the do a flip trick. It's as easy as that! No new mind-blowing moves in this game like the manual, spine transfer, or revert like in the other games, but you have a healthy selection of a lot of new specials and stuff that have a little humor to them as well as stark interest and also you have the new get-off-the-board function. To get off your board, you press R1 and L1 at the same time and you can run around and jump onto ledges. The controls in this phase are actually mildly hard, but you get used to them fast and this is the same as when you drive a car for the first time in the game. The specials are pretty cool. There's one grind special where you do Michael Jackson's moonwalk as you're grinding. And when you invent your own tricks, the possibilities are endless, you know what I'm saying?
Overall, I had a very fun time playing
THUG and that's all that really matters, right? I still have yet to beat it, but I'm on the final level and I've been playing it for a little more than a month (don't ask how I got it earlier than everyone else…), but there's unlimited use to it with all of the multiplayer modes like the new one to the series Firefight along with the online-exclusive ones like Goal Attack and Capture The Flag and don't forget the old favorites like H-O-R-S-E and Trick Attack. With the Create A Skater, Create A Deck, Create A Park (create your own skate park!!!), and Create A Trick, you have a lot to do besides just playing the Story Mode, and don't forget to take this puppy online because that's always fun. As for me, I can't tell you I would create another character and play the game again, but I would definitely keep playing the multiplayer stuff with my friends. The game was fun to play and with the few good songs I like on the game, I give the game an A -. This is truly a spectacular game and should be played by everyone.
"
Tony Hawk's Underground"
Will Soon Be On:
Xbox,
Gamecube, and
Gameboy Advance Rated T for Teens (borderline M for mature…seriously) For:
Language, comic mischief, and mature themes Extreme Sports/Action
2003
Developed By
Neversoft Published By
Activision Similar Games:
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4,
Shaun Murray's Wakeboarding Unleashed, and
Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 Jay's Difficulty Meter (1-5 with five being the hardest):
2 Recommended For:
Skateboarders and fans of extreme sports games A -
