Tony Hawk is one of my favorite series of all time and for some reason I had never actually finished this game prior to today.

Honestly I can see the potential here for a really good game (and compared to the newer games we have sans 1+2 it hurts even more that this game is how it is). But at the same time, it has a lot of weird issues and problems that make it hard to fully enjoy as much as I wanted to.

- Story is serviceable and does it job for a Tony Hawk game but is a big step down imo from what THUG 1, 2, and THAW brought to the table. It is a return to roots in a way, but I would've enjoyed just a bit more if it had a bit more risk involved instead of a pretty standardish get to the top story.

- The gameplay honestly isn't bad. It plays like a Tony Hawk game for the most part and does it relatively well. It never feels wrong or off to play for the most part.

- Performance is one of its biggest issues as the constant and drastic frame dips can be really exhausting to see not only in messing up possible combos and goals as you load from one section to another, but also just can hurt your head after a while as your eyes keep having to adjust to below 30fps to get back to 30 to get to almost 60.

- The goals also aren't bad but get a bit samey as we approach the end and wish there was just a bit more variety.

In reality though, compared to the later Tony Hawk games, this one to me isn't bad. a bit underappreciated but also could be a lot better.

Overall a pretty atrocious entry into the series. The levels are alright and I sort of like the vibe of game, but that's about all of the positive feelings I have. The goals in general just kind of suck and aren't really fun, some of them just don't make sense (like wallriding posters to earn money for an annoying mascot's dance lessons) and others are just really long and specific which makes them kind of a pain in the ass. The characters exist I guess, none of them are really remarkable or leave an impression (or a good impression, at least). Character creation is more limited than ever. The cutscenes look bizarre, maybe it's just the Xbox version but they look like someone filmed the video playing on a monitor. The story, like the characters, just kind of exists, it's not really engaging or interesting in any way, it rivals THUG 2 in quality. The game really likes wasting your time as well, starting or quitting goals takes forever, even if you quit a goal you have to wait for a failure screen to pop up before you actually quit. The "nail the trick" goals are extremely drawn out due to the nature of them, sometimes resetting during one can leave you staring at the screen for 5s straight, bails are also unnecessarily long though that's saved by a fast forward button. Weird design choices as well, there's basically nonstop pop-ups throughout the story, you can hold X to manual for some reason, and someone decided it would be a good idea to have both the manual and rail balance meters stay on the screen simultaneously mid-combo, it's easy enough to adapt to but it was pretty confusing at first. It seems like they were shooting for a return to form of the pre-THUG Tony Hawk games, but they missed the mark pretty wildly.

This is the one that finally delivers on the promise of the "open" Tony Hawk game that they had been nibbling around the edges of since THPS4. Unlike the ridiculous faux-open world of TONY HAWK'S AMERICAN WASTELAND, this does feel like one truly continuous skater heaven that you open new corners of and can freely traverse with relative ease. The familiar NPC-given goals are joined by classic THPS1-3 area-locked, timed sets, as well as a zillion simple, quick, one-trick endurance challenges (grind this long, manual this distance, jump this high etc.) that are marked right on the world for you to stumble upon and try over and over, or just ignore. Everything you do contributes towards the same goal of rising in overall rank in the game's fictional community of skaters, making everything feel immediately rewarding. This level of freedom in gameplay, as well as the huge upgrade to graphics with the new consoles, and the fresh (if occasionally cumbersome) camera perspective lending more immediacy and impact to the skating give this a feeling of newness and evolution that the series hasn't ever had previously.

While this freshness grabbed me immediately and kept me going straight through to the end, the experience does get bogged down in familiar problems like jank and some stupid goals. It does feel somewhat excusable given the amount of content and the ambitious design of the world, but you'd hope they'd have some of this stuff more locked down by now, given that it's, y'know, the eighth one of these.

Even so, the skating still rocks. And like I said, it finally finally hits the spot of a more freeform Hawk adventure, which I, at least, had been eager to see happen.

This version is better than the 6th gen version, but it still sucks. The goals are still largely bad and unfun (though they're not as bad as the 6th gen ones), balance meters are still weird and inconsistent, AND the controls still feel bad compared to old TH games. This version comes with a bail system and goals that also just kind of sucks and feels awful to control for goals, it's sort of like a prototype of what Skate would go on to include but it's so floaty and unwieldy that the bail goals are just kind of miserable.

Turns out the PS3/X360 release is sort of a totally different game to the PS2 version I played (and kinda hated) as a kid? Having played a fair chunk of this, and a bit of the PS2 version as well to compare, this version is a lot better... but I don't know if it's actually good.

There are a lot of weird choices made in this game, chief among them is the arbitrary subculture-based restriction of the create-a-skater system. Limiting clothing, body, and other customisation by a skating equivalent of an RPG class system is a massive step down from previous games and limits the kind of creativity you could have in creating your little skater avatar, seemingly for no real reason. I'm not expecting a post-Jackassification THPS game to be a beacon of progressiveness, but it is kinda weird that the character categories that we have are 'punk', 'surfer', 'urban' (uhhhh), 'woman' (gross) and 'kid' (what the fuck).

Speaking of Jackassification, this game is very much trying to shift in tone to be closer to a realistic skateboarding game after the Diet Viva La Bam of THUG2 and the playable Jim Phillips/Raymond Pettibon cartoon that was American Wasteland (for what it's worth, I think the 80's hardcore -inspired style of THAW and the game in general absolutely rules). In hindsight, this reads as a pre-emptive reaction to EA's skate series. The first skate game would come out within a year of Project 8 and would go on to absolutely eat THPS's lunch. After so many years of annual sequel churn from the THPS series, skate felt fresh with its more realistic aesthetic inspired by then-current core skate culture and its analogue stick-flicking control scheme being a closer simulacrum of the mechanics of skateboard than the arcade-y abstraction of the THPS games.

I admire Project 8 for trying something different, but the end result is that extra systems are just piled on top of each other to the point that it weighs down and dilutes the thing that felt so good about THPS, the rapid-fire precision with which you could navigate it's levels.

There's other weird shit here as well. This game features a truly staggering level of product placement (check out your sweet Nokia video phone!), a Skyrim-esque stat levelling system that discourages exploration, and way too much My Name is Earl-era Jason Lee (vastly inferior to Video Days-era x and even Mallrats-era Lee). The skater ranking system feels totally inscrutable and arbitrary as to when and how you progress up the rankings, and it means that completing the punishingly difficult upper tiers of most challenges never really feels worth it. Not being able to fast travel directly to different missions is an obvious choice made to encourage your engagement with the open world, but it's incredibly frustrating when the levels are as unintuitive to navigate as these are. The bail animations feel slower to complete than previous games, and this really punishes you in time-restricted missions like the filmer challenges where bailing feels like it takes even longer somehow. Even something as small as changing the position of the 'restart mission' button on the pause menu from the first option to the second option has a massive impact on the flow of gameplay - at higher levels of play, any friction introduced in quickly restarting a mission just builds frustration more and more.

Worst of all, this has maybe the worst soundtrack in the series thus far. It's not totally devoid of bangers, and they clearly spent a shitload on licensing massive artists for this game. There's great tracks from Nine Inch Nails, Jaylib, Black Mountain, Liquid Liquid, Primus and +44, and absolute classics from Slayer, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Ramones, and Toots and the Maytalls. I'd even wager that Project 8 has more great songs than the PS1 games could even fit onto their discs, but the overall package feels weighed down with filler (I don't need to hear any of Mike Vallely's music ever again), completely bizarre-in-a-bad-way choices, an almost total lack of good hip-hop and a complete lack of character that even the most cringe THPS games had in the soundtrack (THUG2's use of Sinatra, Johnny Cash, and The Doors was fucking inspired). There are loads of big names, but it doesn't feel as curated.

Zoom out from the soundtrack, and that sentiment resonates broadly across this entire game. There is money, talent, and gameplay pedigree here that means this game isn't entirely bad per se, but to quote the game's soundtrack, "it's gone daddy gone, the love is gone".