The Tony Hawk series is one that has certainly had its ups and downs. Sadly this year’s iteration is one of those downs. Developer Shaba seems to have done everything in its power to make this game as boring and simply un-fun as possible. With stiff game play that makes every trick feel like it’s being performed while rolling through a puddle of molasses you’d be shocked to hear that the next generation versions of this game play like the brilliance that was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. Everything about this game is a port down from those next generation versions, and it hurts this game in every way imaginable, especially when the developer cannot get the fluidity of skateboarding down. This game feels as clunky and flawed as the late nineties disaster, Thrasher Skate & Destroy. Yeah it’s pretty bad when I’m able to compare this to a PS1 title that came in the midst of the system’s life cycle. Shaba has had a nasty habit of ruining ports of titles when they are also making their way to a next generation console. Case in point being Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 back on the PS1; it’s almost like the same scenario all over again.

From the outset of Project 8 you’ll feel like you’re getting burned when you see that the “Cut-scenes” are simple video files of the in-game footage from the next generation Tony Hawk Project 8 and they look like they’ve been run through a bad codec. The presentation for this game just feels incredibly weak and the little things like this really hurt. When you enter the game for the first time you’re presented with a really limited amount of options when it comes to making your skater. At this point in time I wish they would have just stuck with playing as the pros, because you’re not going to be able to make yourself. From there it is off to the first stage, or the training stage, your choice. Once you get in to the game you’ll quickly notice that there is no tunnel to another zone or some interesting little segue to another area. That neat little trick they pulled off in American Wasteland won’t be seen here. Each level is an individual entity, so if you want to go to another area, you’ve got to unlock it, and then navigate to it through a menu. This breaks up a lot of the flow that the previous version held and further hurts what Shaba is trying to accomplish.

The graphics of the game aren’t too shabby, they have a bad grain filter over them but the texturing is good and the character animations are solid. I wouldn’t want to suffer some of the bumps and bruises these guys captured because some of them look sick. The character models you are given though are severely limited and don’t give you much personality to the game, for the pros however they have spared no expense. Though it is kind of insulting to see Xbox 360 in-game footage of them in a cutscene and then see it transition to the PS2 equivalent, boo-urns I say to that kind of tease. The level designs are kind of hit or miss in how they look and feel where as earlier stages feel barren and empty but when you get close to the end of the game you’ll actually feel like they pushed the PS2 to its limits. That is without turning on anti-aliasing. Agh, the jaggies they cut in to my eyes and they hurt! The audio is pretty good, though the decision to link the music you hear to the character type is a little bit of a pain to undo. The voice acting comes off like second nature to all the pros, as it should; they’ve been doing this for years.
Man they pulled off a sick “port shove-it!”