Tony Hawk's Underground

Sam is at his most dextrous 'virtually' skateboarding.

I used to have a skateboard when I was younger. I was never very good at it; a combination of fear and not having a clue how to do anything other than the most basic of tricks ensuring that my skating years lasted for less than 12 months. A nasty tumble at a large number of knots left me looking at the knuckle on my right hand without any skin obscuring the view. This convinced me to stick with WH40K. Fast forward a few years and you would have found me round at my mates, drinking a beer and wishing I owned a Playstation. This was the first time I encountered Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and I loved it. Fast forward another few years and you will see me sitting in front of my telly playing Tony Hawk's Underground, wishing I hadn't abused my body so much in the intervening years as some abstinence may have left me with better manual aptitude.

So what's changed since Tony first trundled out of California and into the consciousness of gamers around the world? The number of different kinds and styles of tricks has mushroomed to the point where there are now more tricks than channels on BSkyB. The soundtrack is full of suitable tracks, although this time round I personally found the choices didn't provide much inspiration while playing the game. Everything looks a heck of a lot better that's for sure, with the Xbox doing a splendid job of rendering the believable city-scapes out to massive distances. The textures are sharper, the action fluid while the amount of choice in your avatar's appearance could fill half an afternoon all on its own. You can even use Gamespy to play other skaters online.

One of the major changes in THUG over its predecessors is the story mode. Rather than having to collect SKATE or win competitions every three levels you are dropped into the game as a young buck out to prove himself. By interacting with the various characters dotted around the levels you get goals to achieve which will then advance the story along. Time limits only apply when trying to complete a goal, so you can just cruise around popping tricks to your heart's content. And you gotta pull tricks off to raise your stats, because in another parting with the last four games you can only increase your grind rating by grinding an ever increasing distance, raise your air by getting higher and so on. This is a welcome change that makes a lot of sense, and really encourages the player to get good at particular skills.

As the game progresses you'll get yourself some sponsorship, start entering Am then Pro competitions, join a team and so on. The goals that you are set out range from the entertaining to the mundane, and while many of them make sense some are just silly, like having to collect the various bits of a tramp's cardboard house which have been blown around the level. It is during the missions that the game's duality is revealed. On the one hand these missions are of the kind you would expect to find in a free-form platformer aimed at kids, while much of the story involves situations and language totally inappropriate for youngsters. So while you may have fun helping out some strippers you may then feel patronised by the juvenile nature of other objectives.

The free-form nature of this new story mode has been much hyped, but frankly it's about as free-form as a piece of cubist art. While you do get to choose which of the missions you complete - there may be five goals on a level but you only need to complete three to progress - the levels themselves are still corralled by impassable terrain. While later on in the game some of these barriers are taken away, thereby expanding known levels into a mega-skatezone, you don't really have total freedom when it comes to choosing where you skate. Another addition in THUG is the ability to dismount from your board and jump about the place. This gives the player access to higher up spots and hard to reach places, and often is an integral part of completing a goal. But again, the levels have all been designed to take this into account, so like an FPS where you can blow up terrain you still have to approach the level in the manner the designer intended. When you are free skating this all becomes irrelevant, and the sense of liberation from the ground is most welcome, but while playing through the story mode you will have to do things just as the designer planned.

So many of the new features in THUG are not quite as what they have hyped to us. Sure you can drive cars but while they do provide variety I found them kind of tedious and that they didn't sit well with the rest of the gameplay. The whole title feels a little tired. This series has been going on a long time and needed some real innovation to keep the pulse up rather than bending the old progress model into something that appears different but is in fact the same thing with some superficial changes. But as a whole THUG is still fun. The skating continues to concentrate on street styles, and many of the levels are so full of possibilities that a fan could lose weeks of their life trying to get all the lines, gaps and transfers. And now that you can keep a combo going for a few seconds while off the board the chance to rack up an insane score has never been better. Again you can create your own parks and this time round you can even create your own tricks. Some of the new manual tricks are great: the Switch Foot Pogo and Truckspin are very different from any you've been able to do before. You can pull a trick just about anywhere and off of nearly any surface so if pulling tricks all day is your thing but you aren't keen on being a hooker then THUG will keep you happy.

There is a lot of content to play with here. It may be best to look at THUG as a virtual playground and while it lasts this is one cool playground. But after four incarnations of essentially the same game it was obvious that Neversoft were going to have to make some fundamental changes to stop the Tony Hawk series from going stale. In Tony Hawk's Underground they have not made those changes in sufficient quantity and quality to stop me from struggling against a sense of déjà vu. Fortunately for both gamers and shareholders THUG is still a lot of fun, and while it won't be winning any awards like the series used to pull in it should still sell in enough numbers to justify a fifth sequel. Hopefully one that will be a lot riskier and manage to update the extreme sports model for the next generation of hardware.

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By Sam Gibson