Tony Hawk's Project 8 (Xbox 360)

The AM, Pro, Sick structure has also been integrated into most of the other challenges in the game – there are a few pass/fail goals, but the vast majority have the 3 grades. This has allowed the developer to get rid of the need to choose if you want to play on easy, normal or sick at the start of the game, beginners can concentrate on just achieving AM goals to begin with and then revisit each goal as their skills improve and try to achieve higher grades without having to start the game over at a higher difficulty level.

Continuing with this level of integration – the “Classic mode” from the previous games has been added into the regular game, where it appears in each level as an individual challenge. Once started, the classic mode consists of the usual sub-challenges, including collect SKATE, collect COMBO, high/pro/sick score etc.
Again, it is nice to have this integrated into the main game rather than a separate mode – although I have to say, I think that attaining sick grade on the Classic challenges is nigh-on impossible (you have to complete all of the classic challenges in one run!).

The final new addition is the intelligent bail system – where the player has been imbued with a rag-doll physics model causing them to bail more realistically. Whilst this looks quite nice, it has annoyingly been made into challenges where you have to get over a certain hospital bill and/or break a certain number of bones, usually whilst knocking down oversized bowling pins or negotiating gates.

For online play there is, naturally, full Xbox Live support which has some interesting new modes – including a fun new game called “Walls” in the style of the TRON light-cycle game where each player leaves a solid trail behind them which the other players have to avoid.

For all this praise, there are a few downsides to the game.
The impressive new graphics are perhaps a little over optimistic for the system and the frame rate frequently drops a little lower than I would like (I assume that it is dropping from 60 to 30 fps). It still as smooth as the previous PS2 versions but it is jarring when the game runs so smoothly normally, I would have much preferred a slight drop in number of objects within the world if they could have kept the frame rate constant. This is a real shame, the graphics give a real sense of immersion and when the frame rate drops it really pulls you out of the world. Hopefully this is just teething problems for the new engine and the next release will not suffer from this problem.

Whilst the new bail mode sounds like it should be fun, quite frankly it isn’t. The bailing just seems too random, sometimes a little bail will break loads of bones and cost a fortune, sometimes a massive crash will leave you unscathed. The amount of control you have when bailing is also very hit and miss, making negotiating gates overly hard and knocking down pins a really boring job of trial and error – just repeating the same task over and over and over. When you start to bail, you seem to continue with exactly the same speed and trajectory meaning very small variations on your movement prior to starting a bail have a disproportionate effect on the outcome – a slight ollie will send you flying way up into the air, but no ollie at all will see you pretty much stop dead.

The online mode is not without its problems too, it can be a little trying at times – you have no control over what game style you will be put into and it actually can take quite a while to successfully connect to a game. It is also very annoying to wait a minute or so to connect to a game only to be told that the host has started the game without you and be kicked back to the game select screen.

The biggest problem I have found, however, is one of stability. In the time I have been playing the game (well over 20 hrs now, which must tell you how much I like it overall) it has locked up my system a large number of times, requiring me to turn the 360 off and on again. As you might expect, this is quite random, sometimes I have played all day with no problems and sometimes it has locked up several times in an hour. This has led to quite a few frustrating occasions where I have spent ages completing a difficult challenge and then had the machine lock up before I have saved the game. I would therefore recommend that you save immediately after completing any particularly difficult challenges.

Tony Hawk games never fail to impress and this one is no exception. As usual there is nothing really ground breaking in this update, but the series has survived the jump to a real next-gen version and continues to evolve intelligently.