
	Platform Xbox 360 Genre Extreme Sports Publisher Activsion Developer Neversoft ESRB T (Teen) Released Q4 2006

- Great skating action - Lots of tricks, missions and combo opportunities - Big, open area to explore

- Nail the Trick mode could’ve used some polishing - Glitches and frame rate drops are irritating

Review: Tony Hawk's American Wasteland (360) Review: Rumble Roses XX (360) Review: THUG 2 (PS2)
Newsletter
Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly. Enter E-Mail Address Below: Subscribe \| Unsubscribe

Tony Hawk's Project 8

Score: 8.0 / 10

It's been eight years, but Neversoft is still hard at work on the Tony Hawk series. It's pretty admirable the way they've been putting out a new game every year, and while some of the more recent games have faltered slightly, they've all attempted to keep the series fresh. The eighth installment, not-so-coincidentally dubbed Tony Hawk's Project 8, scratches out some of the weaker elements of THUG and THAW to create a much more refined game.

Project 8 also happens to stand for a contest Tony Hawk is running, wherein he picks the top eight skaters in the area to join his troupe. Naturally, as a wannabe pro skater, this is your major goal, but the climb isn't easy -- you start ranked all the way at the bottom in position #200. By skating around towns and completing various objectives, you slowly crawl up the ranks, all while unlocking new areas to skate around, new events, and new challenges to overcome.

You can skate around as you please, racking out points and impressing random citizens to obtain stokens, which can be used to customize your board and buy

Advertisement

- Xbox 360 Game Reviews
- Sports Game Reviews
- Games Published by Activision

(mostly useless) trinkets. Talking to certain people will start up missions, requiring you to, say, execute tricks when they're called out, or complete some high scoring combos. A select few people will also give you classic missions, where you need to complete a variety of objectives in a short period of time. Additionally, there are spot challenges, which require you to grind or

Advertisement

manual a certain distance in order to complete them. Each goal has three different rankings, and the better you do, the more points you'll get, and the closer you'll get to being in Project 8.

New to Project 8 is the Nail the Trick mode, which slows down time and zooms the camera in to a close-up on your board. During this mode, you can twist the analog sticks to pull off a variety of flips and other tricks, and hopefully get your board upright before you hit the ground. While it adds some depth to a game overloaded with trick moves, it's still could've used some touch-ups. For starters, it can be a bit difficult getting used to, because there seems to be certain invisible factors which will occasionally trip you and sending you flying into the pavement. It's probable you're doing something wrong when this happens, but it's not like the game ever tells you what exactly you failed on. Additionally, since the camera is so zoomed in, it's often hard to tell where the ground is, which is drastically important to pulling these off.

There are other bits of weird glitches found in Project 8, even beyond the standard clipping errors. The camera can occasionally become misaligned, showing you at a front angle instead of a back, completely screwing up your sense of direction. There are some amusing uses of physics (including a few missions where the goal is to send your avatar flying as far as possible, similar to the FlatOut racing games), but sometimes it totally loses control and bounces your skater hundreds of feet into the air, bouncing around in a kind of gravity that doesn't even remotely qualify as realistic. But worst of all are all of the frame rate drops. There aren't any real load times in Project 8, but every time the game has to stream a new area into memory, the action stutters and chokes, and can occasionally cause you to mess up combos.

This is especially disconcerting, since the game only runs at 30 FPS at maximum. Many of the previous games ran at 60, making this installment seem like a huge step back. The graphics are nice and definitely an improvement over the 360 version of American Wasteland, but if this is the trade-off, I'd rather lose the all of the fancy lighting effects and whatever else they did to the textures, because the improvement still isn't that tremendous. The developers tried to do some realistic character modeling for the skater celebrities but they don't always work out. (Listening to a computerized rendition of Jason Lee dole out skating tips in is worst "My Name is Earl" voice is much creepier than it rightfully should be.)

The most confusing thing is that the 360 version apparently runs better than the PS3 version, which either doesn't say so much for the power of the PS3, or says plenty about the quality of the PS3 port. The 360 version also offers online play, although they're little more than skating contests against other players in a small area, as gamers square off to gain the most points and such.

Some long time options have been gutted too. You can only kinda, sorta customize your skater, and your options are limited to mostly juvenile and lame designs. The skate park creation mode is mostly gone too, limiting you to shuffling certain obstacles around in a few predetermined areas.

Technical hiccups side, Project 8 is as solid as it ever was, and Neversoft is slowly but surely improving the formula without diluting it.

- Kurt Kalata

(January 23, 2007)