Tony Hawk's American Wastleland Review - Xbox 360

5.5

Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 4
Audio: 5
Multiplayer: 6
Innovation: 2

Tony Hawk games have been around almost as long as games turned 3D. American Wasteland was released on the PC, Xbox, PS2, GameCube, and the Xbox 360, which gives an immediate doubt as to whether the game will offer any next-gen features. Bundled with Activision’s western title Gun at launch, American Wasteland offers a quaint package that a Tony Hawk fan can look forward to, but is it worthy of being on a next-gen console?

Gameplay

American Wasteland is a tightly packed Tony Hawk game, full of goodies that any Tony Hawk fan can enjoy. The story mode is fairly extensive, and although it does feature the incredibly overrated moronic Bam Margera, you don’t have to put up with him for very long. The story mode allows you to unlock new areas of the city of Los Angeles, including Santa Monica, Hollywood, Beverley Hills, and more. As you work through the story mode, you’re taught new tricks not only on your skateboard, but also on a BMX which adds a whole new level to the game. Don’t worry though, you don’t have to skate to different areas once unlocking them, you can simply catch the bus free of charge.

Money isn’t much of an issue in American Wasteland, you can locate characters that will get you to do tricks for money, and these missions are never ending. It might take a while to save up for a new costume from the clothes shop, but it’s definitely not hard to get money. What’s most important and probably the key to the story mode is collecting pieces from different parts of the city to bring back to your “American Wasteland” skate park. As you work through all the missions in the game, your skate park becomes better, however the cops get involved and things get quite ugly for a moment. The story is actually quite realistic, apart from towards the end where all the pro skaters suddenly appear on the streets of L.A. offering you missions.

The other modes don’t offer anything new. Classic mode has different maps to the story mode, but they’re nowhere near as interesting as the original levels in the first few Tony Hawk games. The goals in classic mode are exactly the same as previous games, and you can complete the entire mode in two to three hours. The online mode (2 – 8 players) is basically the same as free-skate mode (2 players only), which starts off in free-skate, and allows the host to start a new event or change the map whenever they want. We found the online achievements rather amusing. All that is required is to create an online game in each of the areas!

American Wasteland offers very little innovation. There’s the whole (continued next page)