This review contains spoilers
I love the original Tony Hawk's Underground, it was one of my favourite games as a child that holds some of my fondest memories of games in general and is one that even returning to many years later I love pretty much everything about. More than anything I love how it controls and I was pleased to find that pretty much any change to the actual skating here is for the better, including the fantastic focused mode in which you slow down time during a combo and it really helps you to nail them better. I also loved the carefully-crafted maps of the original game and those are mostly to be found here as well, so you'd imagine that this would just be the original but better right?
Unfortunately, there is something big that holds this game back significantly and that is the story. Now, story was never exactly hugely important to the Tony Hawk's franchise. The Pro Skater games that I've played have pretty much zero story elements and are just levels in which to accomplish missions, but Underground had a very simple yet grounded story that kept me invested. I love stupid cheesy melodrama and that game was perfect with it. This game is not perfect with it. This game traded in the attempt at making a half-gritty half-satirical angsty teen skater movie style story (which is absolutely stupid in premise but I loved it) for what cannot be described any other way than "insane". Although batshit may also fit. Pretty much every cutscene was annoying, it was almost funny in the sense of being so unfunny that it wrapped around again but I get the feeling from a 2004 skating game that there aren't many levels of irony to the humour. That means we are left with a game that thinks a big fat naked man existing is funny, and while arguably maybe that very concept in isolation becomes funny due to absurdity, it is not really funny in this game. Nor is most of the anything, from the edgiest of 2004 skateboard video game fan jokes to Bam Margera apparently being a psychotic arsonist who yearns to find feeling in his life again by burning down an entire skatepark village and attempting to kill everybody inside. That last bit is actually quite funny in isolation again. Anyway TL;DR the game plays really well but suffers from its surroundings. Not quite the game I grew up with, and I'd probably have to thank my father for that (he would not have approved of this game).
Unfortunately, there is something big that holds this game back significantly and that is the story. Now, story was never exactly hugely important to the Tony Hawk's franchise. The Pro Skater games that I've played have pretty much zero story elements and are just levels in which to accomplish missions, but Underground had a very simple yet grounded story that kept me invested. I love stupid cheesy melodrama and that game was perfect with it. This game is not perfect with it. This game traded in the attempt at making a half-gritty half-satirical angsty teen skater movie style story (which is absolutely stupid in premise but I loved it) for what cannot be described any other way than "insane". Although batshit may also fit. Pretty much every cutscene was annoying, it was almost funny in the sense of being so unfunny that it wrapped around again but I get the feeling from a 2004 skating game that there aren't many levels of irony to the humour. That means we are left with a game that thinks a big fat naked man existing is funny, and while arguably maybe that very concept in isolation becomes funny due to absurdity, it is not really funny in this game. Nor is most of the anything, from the edgiest of 2004 skateboard video game fan jokes to Bam Margera apparently being a psychotic arsonist who yearns to find feeling in his life again by burning down an entire skatepark village and attempting to kill everybody inside. That last bit is actually quite funny in isolation again. Anyway TL;DR the game plays really well but suffers from its surroundings. Not quite the game I grew up with, and I'd probably have to thank my father for that (he would not have approved of this game).