When I think of skateboarding I think of one person, Tony Hawk. It is true he is quickly approaching forty, but in the gaming world he is just starting to catch a stride. Back in my younger years I tried to skate a little bit but was never really able to stand up on my banana board. However thanks to Activision, for the past eight years I have been able to live my dreams vicariously through the virtual world of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater videogame series. The series has taken lots of different twists and turns throughout its lifetime but lucky for us developers Neversoft Entertainment have decided to take the series back to its roots and make a classic Xbox 360 skateboarding game. While I was out in Los Angeles I got a chance to sit down with the new Tony Hawk game and bust a couple moves. Although this is not the first Tony Hawk game to grace the Xbox 360 it is certain to be the best, great graphics, open world style play, and fun online modes are shaping Tony Hawk’s Project 8 to be a surefire winner to both fans of the series and newcomers alike.
The first thing that fans of the Tony Hawk series will notice when picking up Project 8 for the first time is that the controls are very much the same as they used to be in the original games. No more of this crazy stuff that has been sneaking its way into the past few games in the series. You can choose to use either the analog stick or d-pad to control your favorite skater, combining the directional input with either a kick or grab trick button to pull off anything from a kick flip to a grinder with a simple button combination. On top of that, the revert, grinding, and manual controls are identical from previous Hawk games, allowing players to string together combos on the ground, in the air, or across pipes for massive points. After playing for only a few minutes I was able to pull off insane tricks like I never put the game down (I haven’t seriously played a Tony Hawk game in three or four years). This feature is something I like to call the “newbie” feature as it allows novice gamers to pick up a controller and actually have fun playing Project 8, something that has been absent in the past couple of attempts. Hardcore fans out there do not worry though, Neversoft has added a few new features into the controls, which makes for some really cool tricks. The “trick stick” is a control feature that allows you to, in mid air, click in the right analog stick and have the game switch into “trick mode”. This is a slowed down version of the normal game where, using the analog sticks, you can move your board around and flip it different ways to complete air tricks. The feature needs to be polished a bit more before final release but to me it was one of the more fun aspects of Project 8.
The other aspect of Project 8 that fans of the Tony Hawk games will notice is the return to classic style gameplay and missions. Remember the first couple games on the Playstation One? Basically all you did was load up a level and there was eight different “missions” to complete. These missions were everything from pulling off 100,000-point combos to collecting all five letters of S-K-A-T-E. If you don’t remember busting a grind on that tree limb to knock the snow down onto that old man then you need to check yourself. I was so happy to see these types of game elements in Project 8 and it really brought back that classic feeling I used to get when sitting down with a Tony Hawk game. But Neversoft wasn’t naïve enough to think that just throwing together a classic Tony Hawk title would be enough to satisfy fans of the series. Besides the missions and the control scheme everything else is totally new or revamped from previous games. First off Tony Hawk Project 8 features a huge “open world” type style of gameplay that basically throws you into this huge city where your purpose is to explore and conquer.
The mission style is classic but the way that you start those missions is not, there are around eight different classic mission groups but they are scattered all over the city. Just skate up to a specific area and press a button and bam you are transferred to the eight missions that make up that part of the city. Sound confusing? Trust me, it won’t be once you get a chance to sit down with the game early next month. The open world gameplay also allows for plenty of side missions and quests to take up your time when you don’t want to do those classic style missions. There is everything from building a skate park to letting a director follow you around while you pull off mad grinds. The amount of side missions available is just insane and I can easily see this game taking a long while to complete, much longer than past versions of Tony Hawk. At the Activision HQ we got a chance to play through a couple of the different classic missions as well as take a run in the skate park, do some free skating, and try out a few of those side missions that are new to the series. Some of the missions were way to difficult and that took away from the overall fun I was having in the game, hopefully this will be more balanced once the game goes gold. All in all I would have to say that the gameplay side of Project 8 is shaping up to be something new and exciting but still grasping on to that classic part of the series that everyone loves so much.
