It’s kind of funny, when you think about it, that one of the newest icons in the video gaming pantheon isn’t a character created specifically for video games, like Mario or Sonic or Mega Man, but skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Since the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was released back in 1999 for the PSOne, each subsequent game in the series has brought more and more players into the world of video skateboarding. Last year’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, in particular, really opened up the series by eliminating the main constraint on the game, which was that each run was limited to two minutes, so the levels had to be small enough to be fully explored within that time limit. In fact, I was so impressed with that particular game that I really wondered where the series would be able to go from there.
The answer to that question comes in Tony Hawk’s Underground, the fifth Tony Hawk skateboarding game. Tony Hawk’s Underground (or, if you prefer, the clever abbreviation THUG) purports to turn the series on its end by adding a story mode to the tried and true skateboarding levels. As a result, in order to advance the story, you’re not only going to have to be able to skateboard well, but you’re also going to be expected to get off your board to run and drive around the various levels. That’s not to say that all the skateboarding tasks present in previous Tony Hawk games won’t be there as well, but by adding extra gameplay elements, THUG promises to take video skateboarding to the next level.
Well, if the next level means incremental improvements and introducing elements that dilute the otherwise excellent gameplay, then they have certainly reached it. Of course that probably wasn’t what they meant.
Now, don’t get me wrong: Tony Hawk’s Underground is still an excellent game, as it builds on the foundation that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 provided. The story mode, however, doesn’t make as much of an impact as one would expect it to, and the new gameplay elements end up being more of a hindrance than an improvement.
The story that drives the main game is a good start for the series, but it’s not anything that will win it any literary awards. Basically, you start out as a teenager in a run-down area of New Jersey (and thank you to the designers for further sullying the image of my fine birth state, as it wasn’t already known as the armpit of America) who aspires to be a professional skater. You start out evading drug dealers and trying to get some footage together to impress the local skate shop owner enough to award you with a sponsorship. The rest of the game takes you all over the country (and eventually the world) to different skate competitions and the hijinks that surround them. It’s not a terrible story, but more often than not it just feels like filler in between objectives and an excuse to work the pro skaters into the main game.
That said, while the main game is still broken up into several areas, the areas are now further divided into several story chapters, 27 in all. Each chapter contains anywhere from two to eight or so goals, most (but not all) of which must be completed in order to advance to the next chapter. The goals, for the most part, are standard Tony Hawk goals: perform this series of tricks, collect this series of items that are scattered about, manual from here to there, etc. Some goals, however, involve driving or platform-style missions, and these are easily the most frustrating in the game. Driving is manageable; the driving controls are very basic, and the cars in general have very loose handling, but none of the driving missions are particularly difficult so this is balanced out. (One quick side note: If you’ve seen the commercials on TV and thought that you get to drive a Russian tank at some point during the game, you can’t. It’s just a cutscene. It’s really a shame, because I saw that in the commercials as I was playing through and had that to look forward to, as the driving would be ten times cooler if it was inside a tank, but I was severely let down when I found out that the sequence in question is completely non-interactive. Just a word of warning for those similarly misled.)
The missions that involve getting off your board and running around on foot, however, require special mention, because they are simultaneously the best and worst new additions to the game. With a press of L1 and R1 together, your skater will jump off his board and run around on foot, an ability that is useful in the middle of combos and necessary for some goals. Its usage in combos is interesting, as you can jump off your board for a short time and then run somewhere else to continue a combo, which does add an interesting element to your lines. Even if you don’t use it for that purpose, it’s generally a good feature to be able to reposition yourself without fighting with the forward momentum of the board. However, when you have to use this for missions, it is easily one of the most frustrating experiences in the game. The main problem is that Tony Hawk’s Underground is a skateboarding game first and a platform game a distant second, as it should be; as a result, it seemed that the designers really didn’t know how to implement control for a character off the board, so they simply mimicked the on-board control. That is to say that jumps are initiated when you release the jump button as opposed to when you first press it, you have to press a separate button to grab onto a ledge (which accounts for most of what you’ll be doing in the missions), and your skater has two speeds: running and standing still. Again, this would be fine if you were just getting from point A to point B, but when the game has you jumping from ledge to ledge like an angst-ridden Lara Croft, it falls apart. And if that wasn’t enough, some of the off-board missions are (wait for it) stealth missions! So not only do you run around like a crazed chimpanzee when you’re off the board, but you have to be vewwy, vewwy quiet at the same time. Not cool. Not cool at all.
Other than that, though, the game provides familiar Tony Hawk action without rocking the boat too much. One nice feature they added in is a variety of difficulty levels, which mainly changes the time limits and other factors to make the goals easier and harder. Especially nice is the addition of a beginner mode with more lenient physics so that you can learn the basics of pulling off tricks without bailing too often. This is a great addition as the games have been aimed more and more at the hardcore Tony Hawk player with little regard for accessibility to newer players. Even on normal mode, though, the game doesn’t get all that difficult until the very end; most of the difficulty comes from vague mission descriptions or items being hidden in obscure places, not from the maneuvers you need to accomplish to complete the goals.
There is also a big emphasis on customization in Tony Hawk’s Underground. As you are the star of story mode, Create-a-Skater goes from a nice addition to a mandatory activity in this game. There are lots of options for clothing, facial features, etc., and, if you can get your PS2 online, you can even upload a picture of yourself and map it to the skater model, which is a cool feature. The park editor is expanded as well, with some options for creating simple goals to play through, and there’s now a mode in which you can create your own decks and tricks. All in all, if you like this kind of thing, THUG is a veritable playground for you. If not, then other than Create-a-Skater, which you can pass through with the bare minimum, you can avoid all this entirely. Something else to note is that you can swap all these things online, so if you have that capability, there is much more than the base game available for you to experience.
Control, as usual, is tight, with the exception of on foot controls. The standard control method of assigning different trick methods to the face buttons is untouched, as it should be. The on-foot controls do combine with everything else to create new trick lines, which makes for new combos to discover. (You really don’t realize how many different maneuvers that have been added over the years until late in the game, when one particular goal asks you to only use maneuvers that were available in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, then 2, then the original.) Overall, other than the pseudo-platforming controls, Tony Hawk’s Underground is a breeze to pick up for anyone who’s used to the series, and newcomers have the beginner mode to learn to appreciate it.
Graphically, Tony Hawk is good, but it could certainly be improved somewhat. The trick animations, as usual, are excellent, but the character models look otherwise stiff, and the skaters’ mouths don’t really move properly during the cutscenes. That aside, though, the levels are diverse and well rendered, and the framerate stays fairly stable, with only a hint of clipping issues here and there.
Sound, as usual, is excellent. Most of the skating sound effects have been carried over from the earlier games, with some additional sound effects to differentiate between grinding surfaces. The voice acting is also fairly good, with many of the pro skaters providing their own voices, and while your skater’s friend Eric has a bit of a whiny voice, he never really talks for so long that it gets to be an issue. The game’s soundtrack boasts 72 songs, and now you can turn them off by genre (Punk, Hip Hop, and Rock/Other) in addition to track by track, which is a welcome addition. There are a few interesting songs, the most fun of which being a live version of Kiss’ “Rock and Roll All Night”, butr other than that, few are all that memorable. Still, there’s nothing offensive, and it all fits the game pretty well.
So is Tony Hawk’s Underground worth your money? If it’s your first time playing a Tony Hawk game and/or you have online capabilities with your PS2, then the answer is an emphatic yes. There is enough to discover as a beginner and enough to download with an online adaptor that you’ll more than get your money’s worth. As for the rest of us, Tony Hawk’s Underground is undoubtedly a good game, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d played through this game before. Sure, there are improvements, but it feels more like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2003 than a brand new game in the series, and certainly not different enough to warrant a name change. If you’re content with that, then you might enjoy Tony Hawk’s Underground, but if you were expecting THUG to completely overhaul the series, as I was, you’ll likely be disappointed. It’s not that it’s a bad game, of course, but it just feels like the designers might need to take a year off and come up with some new ideas; they tried here, but the elements they inserted to make the game different just end up bringing the rest of the game down a notch. If nothing else, though Tony Hawk’s Underground certainly deserves at least a rental, if not an outright purchase, as long as you don’t expect it to completely rock your socks off.
The revolution may be televised, but it wasn’t built into Tony Hawk’s Underground.
