Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

Back in 1999, Activision released the first Tony Hawk game on the Nintendo64, thus starting one of the most popular Activision franchises of the past 8 years. However, after 8 main titles (and various other mobile incarnations), it appears they may have plateaued. Same story line with yourself as the skater out to prove himself. Same basic game play (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). Same over-use of skater slang.

As with any sequel, they tried to add more features on top of what they’ve had in previous versions. In TH American Wasteland, it was the ability to go from level/environments without loading. In TH Project 8 (a bit of a lazy title), it was a slow-mo feature to do more freestyle tricks. With TH Proving Ground, they added the ability to add ramps and other physical elements to the single player environment, plus a video editor to make your own skate videos.

Now, with the level/area loading, you still can seamlessly go from a new unlocked area of the city without load times, but thats where the lack of loading stops. Playing the single player, you still end up sitting around waiting for 15-20 long seconds times when working on story portions of the sandbox single player part of the game.

Another new feature developers at Neversoft added to THPG is a video editor. Basically, it’s designed to let the player make skate videos to show off their work. The interface and the use was simple but clunky. Aside from the control of the camera’s position being a bit jenky, recording from different angles is buggy for a couple of reasons. First, you can’t unlock the camera from the skater, it’s always got the skater targeted. Second, because of the lock-on, the camera will freak-out and massive clipping will occur if you place the camera too close to a wall. For example, I transfered from one ramp to another with the camera between the two ramps. As soon as I got too close and launched into the air above it, the camera wigged out.

Finally, one last thing they changed, was how your character evolves. The more points you get for doing a specific kind of trick, the more that ability grows. In prior versions, there was more of a role playing element to it since you could manage directly how those skills were developed. While this new way is more dynamic and organic, it simulates real life a bit too much. The more you work at that experience, the more the skill grows.

To be honest, online multiplayer doesn’t really seem like something that interests anyone but the diehard fans of the franchise. In my experience, online multiplayer free skate was more populated than online multiplayer competitive game modes. They tout that one of the new features is that you can easily go from single player to multiplayer, but that just means they put the Xbox Live menu item in the pause menu. You still end up watching the loading screen while it switches modes.

Anyway, overall I wouldn’t say this is a bad title. For hardcore Hawk fans, there won’t be any hesitation to get this. For normal fans, there might be some disappointment, but its still worth buying. For anyone not familiar with the series, I’d suggest going back to Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland and play that first.