Tony Hawk's Proving Ground review (X360)

Tony Hawk may have retired from the skateboarding game, but he still shows no signs of giving up on the video games market, and who can blame him, there hasn’t exactly been a load of competition has there? There’s been a few other ‘extreme’ sports games gone up against him in the past, BMXs or rollerblading, but up until now there hasn’t been any competition in the skateboarding department. But now with Electronic Arts Skate entering the arena Activision is really going to have to raise its game if they want to keep its franchise at the top of the heap.

Aptly Named

The latest installment is titled ‘Proving Ground’ which, even if it wasn’t for EA's competition, is very appropriate, the series has been on a bit of a decline since Activision dropped the Pro Skater title. Last year's Project 8 was an improvement over the mistakes that were Underground and American Wasteland, and Proving Ground follows the trend. There are some definite improvements here, last year's ‘Nail the Trick’ feature has been expanded on with the new ‘Nail the Grab’ and ’Nail the Manual’ features. These work in a similar way as ‘Nail the Trick‘, using the analogue sticks to control your arms and board rather than your skaters legs, these are great for racking up some really high scoring combos, and are certainly very showy, but they’re not without their bad points. The main problem with them is that even if you know how to use these features the game just doesn’t allow you to until you are taught them by one of the games characters. They aren’t exactly difficult to work out if you played ‘Project 8’ but still the game requires you to ‘learn’ them, it’s a problem that is shared with a lot of the moves you can pull off later in the game, you can’t just pull off mad tricks from the off, you have to follow the game's stories to learn the necessary skills. I suppose it makes things a bit more realistic having to learn tricks, but unlike Skate with its sim like approach, Tony Hawks has always been a purely arcade style game, and it just doesn’t seem right not having access to all the abilities from the off.

Pick your Path

Unlike previous games in the series there is no one story in this game, there are several stories you can follow covering three skating disciplines. You can go hardcore, and just skate for the love of skating, be a rigger, and build your own skate parks in the middle of the street, or go professional, and make a career out of skating. Each discipline has several stories to play through, all hosted by a real pro skater, these stories are pretty much the standard fare from past games really, but each with their own focus. The hardcore and career stories especially are nothing out of the ordinary from past games, but being a rigger is a bit different, it takes the create a park mode from previous games and allows you to apply it to the cities that you skate in, building longer lines, placing ramps and pipes to reach areas not normally accessible. It’s a nice touch to be able to build on what is already there, because, to be quite honest, the level design is pretty inconsistent., some of this is really good, with some truly immense skate lines to follow, but other areas are just bland and generic. It’s all quite evenly spaced out over the games three cities Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, so you don’t notice it so much, and there’s certainly plenty to explore. But as with the tricks, it’s not all available to you from the start, you start off in Philadelphia and as you progress areas of cities open up to you, this makes things a bit dull to start with, as the starting area is one of the more dull and generic areas.

Added Extras

There are a few extras been added on top of all the usual as well, like photo taking and video recording, this is a nice touch, but it’s not been implemented all that well. Other games such as Halo 3 and PGR4 which have similar features implement it much better, allowing you to decide if you want to save the video or take a photo of it after the event, allowing you to capture those freak unintentional moments that you want to show off to all your friends. Here you have to start the camera when you want to take a video, not really ideal for capturing those accidental moments when you pull off an amazing trick without meaning to. The photo system is even worse too, on certain missions there will be cameras dotted around to capture your tricks, and that’s about it, you can’t just take a photo anywhere. It’s a shame really, because this is exactly the sort of game where you’d want to show your friends videos of when you do something amazing, it must be noted as well that Skate does have the same feature, but properly implemented, even if it’s video editing options aren’t as comprehensive.

Time for Retirement?

There’s the old argument of ‘it it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, but sometimes you just have to throw things out because they’re old, they may still work perfectly well, but time has moved on and they aren’t all they could be, and this is the case here. The series has had a good run, but it just hasn’t really evolved much from it’s initial outing and unless they can do a complete reinvention on the next installment then Actvision should just call it a day. EA has obviously noticed this, and capitalized on it with Skate, Activision need to take note of the competition, and learn from them, because it’d be a sad thing to see another Tony Hawks game put to shame like this.