Tony Hawk's Proving Ground Review - Xbox 360

6

Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 6
Audio: 8
Multiplayer: 6
Innovation: 6

Introduction

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground is the latest instalment in a franchise that has dominated the skating genre for nearly ten years. The Hawk titles are almost an annual release now, and though the innovation has subsided over recent years, Neversoft have always managed to tweak the mechanics in just enough areas to fend off that feeling of staleness levelled at most other yearly titles. This was most evident in the last release, Project 8, with the introduction of the Nail-The-Trick mode, a feature that had a mixed response from critics and gamers alike. The masses will want something fresh in this latest outing and with Skate being widely praised, Tony's Hawk Proving Ground needs to rise to the occasion.

Gameplay

THPG is set across the USA east coast cities of Philadelphia, Washington D.C and Baltimore. After creating your skater, it's your goal to skate your way around town impressing the pros and completing goals. Gone is a story mode trying to add some meat to the adventure, instead your skating style falls under 3 different categories. The different categories are represented by different pro skaters, presumably in their own key strength areas.

There's the Career mode which has you travelling from location to location getting pics taken for mags, shooting videos and winning competitions. Being successful in these attracts sponsors, which brings in the cash that can be spent on apparel as well as buying tricks. Hardcore mode is a Jackass themed path of extreme jumps or tricks as well as the occasional punking of the local skate gang or troublesome pedestrians.

The most interesting path is Rigging, which has you utilising anything that's not nailed down to set up elaborate tricks. Rigging Mode requires you to enter a sub-screen and manoeuvre objects around the environment to set up tricks. The process quickly becomes extremely tedious, mainly due to the unresponsive controls, difficulty of use and lack of variety. Talk about when good ideas go wrong! There is also little point in using a lot of the equipment provided, with most of the tricks being able to be performed with just railing and a half pipe/ramp.

Besides the main career paths there are also plenty of street challenges littered around the 3 cities. These are mainly manual, grind or jump goals and are ways to boost your skating stats. While they’re fun to do when you on the way through, once again there is very little variety or significant reward to make you source them out.

I guess the question everyone is asking is does THPG offer anything radically new in terms of gameplay mechanics? Short answer: no. Proving Ground picks up where Project 8 left off, it tries to implement some new facets, but they're poorly developed and will most probably not be utilised anymore than they have to be.

As mentioned earlier, Nail-The-Trick is back and it's been expanded slightly. As you progress further into the game you'll unlock Nail-A-Grab and Nail-A-Manual. Same initiation points - different tricks. Pressing down on the thumb sticks enters (continued next page)