Whilst it's easily the best modern day Tony Hawk, I come away from just wanting to go back and play THPS3 again. There's a lot here to like, and it should be commended for it, but there's a lot where it just falls short.
Let's start with biggest miss - the levels themselves, whilst faithfully created, are just far too busy at times. In the originals, due to the tech at the time the levels were basic, but they popped. Now, everything just blends together, and some of the busier levels (Venice Beach is just a brown nightmare) make it hard to navigate at times. This also affects collectables, as now you've got 2 minutes to search the grey wasteland for 5 grey things to collect. What I don't understand is that some collectables have a nice glow around them, making them standout (which is a necessity on some levels), whilst others are just...part of the environment. The skate sign task on one level is horrible, tasking you with finding 5 small signs in a darkened grey wasteland. Yikes.
On top of the busy levels, there's just busywork everywhere. Part of the fun of the originals was that it was just game. Just a good game you can easily drop in without worrying about what you needed to do. Now, there's hundreds of tasks you need to work towards. And some of these are literally busywork - the time to Platinum is rated at 90 hours, purely as you need to complete all these tasks. One involves getting to level 100, which is just tedious as it requires multiple playthroughs with multiple characters - it's such a blatant disrespect of a players time.
Thankfully, the actual act of skating is still fun, and stringing combos becomes second nature after a while. The lack of many clean cut lines in some levels is a downer, but landing a large combo is as good a feeling as ever.
In the end, it tugs on the nostalgia strings, but once that's over you realise this game just feels...hollow? Which is odd considering the sheer amount of crap they've thrown in, but there's such large plateaus of nothing between the spikes of fun that it's not replayable for me. If I were 20 years younger I'm not even sure I'd enjoy it, as there's such a dearth of quality games now that to stick with something like this for so long just seems a waste. I finished both 1+2 on here and even at the end of that I thought it had overstayed it's welcome.
Let's start with biggest miss - the levels themselves, whilst faithfully created, are just far too busy at times. In the originals, due to the tech at the time the levels were basic, but they popped. Now, everything just blends together, and some of the busier levels (Venice Beach is just a brown nightmare) make it hard to navigate at times. This also affects collectables, as now you've got 2 minutes to search the grey wasteland for 5 grey things to collect. What I don't understand is that some collectables have a nice glow around them, making them standout (which is a necessity on some levels), whilst others are just...part of the environment. The skate sign task on one level is horrible, tasking you with finding 5 small signs in a darkened grey wasteland. Yikes.
On top of the busy levels, there's just busywork everywhere. Part of the fun of the originals was that it was just game. Just a good game you can easily drop in without worrying about what you needed to do. Now, there's hundreds of tasks you need to work towards. And some of these are literally busywork - the time to Platinum is rated at 90 hours, purely as you need to complete all these tasks. One involves getting to level 100, which is just tedious as it requires multiple playthroughs with multiple characters - it's such a blatant disrespect of a players time.
Thankfully, the actual act of skating is still fun, and stringing combos becomes second nature after a while. The lack of many clean cut lines in some levels is a downer, but landing a large combo is as good a feeling as ever.
In the end, it tugs on the nostalgia strings, but once that's over you realise this game just feels...hollow? Which is odd considering the sheer amount of crap they've thrown in, but there's such large plateaus of nothing between the spikes of fun that it's not replayable for me. If I were 20 years younger I'm not even sure I'd enjoy it, as there's such a dearth of quality games now that to stick with something like this for so long just seems a waste. I finished both 1+2 on here and even at the end of that I thought it had overstayed it's welcome.