While the game consistently tosses a wide variety of goals at you it falters when it comes to the quality of the goals. Call me silly but I like to skate in a skating game, not toss tomatoes at pedestrians and ram into runaway bulls. When THUG 2 asks you to skate you’ll have a blast; when it asks you to perform a number of nonsensical goals you’ll cry out in frustration. The problem is that the game spends too much time masquerading as some kind of adventure and not enough time living as a skating game. There are a lot of problems when it comes to the actual structures of the goals as well. Often times you’ll feel lost because the developers never offer up enough guidance. They give you something to do, show you a poorly framed picture of it and expect you to be able to accomplish it without really mentioning any specifics. It’s like being told to bake a cake from scratch just by looking at a picture from a cook book. The final product is there but the means and methods of how to get there are missing.
Luckily the game makes up for this by introducing Classic Mode, a take on the timed-runs of the original Tony Hawk games. It operates much like the old THPS in that you’ll have to accomplish a series of goals before the clock runs out. All of the goals will immediately be familiar to longtime fans; things like high score totals and S-K-A-T-E reemerge here in full force. This is an excellent feature, it’s just a shame that Neversoft decided to let it play second fiddle to the world tour mode. It's nice to be able to do more skating and less running around town and puking on security guards. Perhaps Neversoft realized this because they’ve also included a Create-A-Goal mode which allows you to insert your own goals into the level. It sounds like a lame idea but it’s actually pretty fun to create your own goals and watch your friends struggle to accomplish them.
Each year the franchise gets one new feature that enhances the experience; this year is the lone exception. That’s not to say that there aren’t any additions, they’re here but they don’t really make an impact on the overall game. The focus feature can be activated by pressing the L3 button when your SPECIAL meter is filled. After triggering it, the camera will zoom in on your skater and time will be slowed down, giving you the impression that you’re “in the zone.” It’s supposed to make things easier by giving you more time to react but I found that it throws your timing off and makes things more difficult. You’ve probably seen skaters freak out and toss their board out of frustration after repeatedly missing up a trick. You now activate the Freak Out feature by rapidly pressing the triangle button after falling down. If you’re successful your character will freak out and break his board, rewarding you with a special and adding a multiplier to your combo. The only addition that will make an impact is the ability to perform inversions in the air. By double tapping in a direction you can perform a front flip, a back flip or a sideways roll. Success in the game isn’t derived from your ability to pull off these inversions but it very well could be the difference in the online realm.
Neversoft’s franchise has never been at the forefront of graphical technology, but it’s always been pleasing to behold. The same holds true for this entry in that it won’t dazzle you but it’ll always keep you entranced. All of the skater animations still look superb although they look kind of weird when you witness the other skaters in the level. I like the level design and the sheer amount of detail that fills each level is truly amazing. Where the game falters a bit is in the texture work, so while the world features plenty of variety in the architecture, it’s often burdened by sub-par texture work that’s not really all that appealing. Other than that the game looks superb and all of the skaters look like their real-life counterparts. This game has more skating lines than ever so there are more objects than ever before. THUG 2 is the first game in the franchise that really seems plausible in the real world. You’ll trick off of rails and benches instead of mysteriously placed picnic tables in the middle of a bull ring. All of the special effects that populated the rest of the Tony Hawk games are here as well and they still hold up quite well. As is the case with most multi-platform titles the Xbox version looks the cleanest while the PS2 and GameCube versions are of comparable quality.
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