Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 (PS4)

The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series hit on an excellent formula with its combo-focused action that was approachable even if you had no knowledge of skateboarding and its surrounding scene. A strong attitude, stellar licensed soundtrack, and enjoyable score challenge built around grinding, board flips, and other tricks helped the series become a spectacular example of adapting a sport into video game form with enjoyability being the focus over authenticity. However, the gameplay didn’t really find its footing until it was refined in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, and the games after that continued to hone it even further until it lost its way chasing gimmicks and a half-committal approach to realism that didn’t gel with the rest of the experience. The golden age of the series still held up fairly well though, but because the first two titles didn’t have the vital abilities added in the later installments like reverts and spine transfers, they always felt a little antiquated. Rereleases tried to update them such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2x, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is truly the rebirth of these classic titles, their mechanics finally up to snuff with the amazing games that followed the originals.

The most important part of a Tony Hawk game is the combo potential of the skateboarding. Scoring points is your most common objective in the game’s single player and multiplayer modes, so being able to chain them together needs to be fluid but challenging. Grinding on rails and using manuals to carry you between parts of the levels will prove to be your most common tool for scoring points, and both rely on balance meters that get harder to maintain the longer you linger in that sort of trick. Certain moves provide a basic amount of points that can be built up if held for longer and Special Tricks can be executed once you’ve performed enough regular tricks to build up the energy for their meter, but the most important part of a high scoring combo is linking together plenty of tricks without coming to a stop or bailing during your tricks. Every new trick added to the chain adds to a multiplier, but repeated tricks provide less and less points each time, encouraging not only an incredibly long combo, but one with plenty of variety. Taking time to jump and do flip tricks, find ramps to do grab tricks, or passing through special areas of the level to trigger special bonuses known as gaps will all contribute greatly to a hefty point tally. Lip tricks where you balance on the edge of a ramp or empty pool exist as well, but they are perhaps the hardest to add to a trick because they require the right approach to the edge and slow down your skater when maintaining speed is one of your best bets for getting insanely high scores.

Figuring out the best combo route through a level, maintaining your balance meters, throwing in varied tricks, and avoiding dangers like out of bound areas or an area with little to grind on all feel surprisingly natural despite the know how and dexterity needed to really start racking up the high scoring combos. It’s easy to develop a sort of intuition for how to continue your combo with what lies ahead, but even once you have a deep understanding of the best ways to earn points, the balance meters and other considerations for pulling off a trick chain successfully keep it challenging. The levels are an incredibly important part of this formula for satisfying play, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 +2 naturally draws its set of levels from the two older titles its adapting. Made for systems like the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64, the stages brought over are far more simplistic in layout than those from the later titles, but this rerelease gives them a modern coat of paint and reworks them somewhat to help them provide some more natural combo routes. Sometimes that simplicity can come in handy though, levels like Warehouse and Hangar having easy set ups to slip into for consistent grinding potential. On the other hand, some levels like Burnside suffer because they aren’t laid out the best for long combos even with their updates or seem out to end your chains prematurely like Venice Beach’s many opportunities to end up out of bounds. For the most part the levels come out to be an excellent bunch with some tapping on the simplicity of skate parks with plenty of devoted rails and ramps and others like NY City and Streets making the real world locations of New York City and San Francisco into surprisingly solid hosts for street skating.

The single player component of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 takes you on a tour of most of the game’s 19 levels, most of them involving a series of goals you need to complete to unlock the following stages. Some are tied to the game’s combo system like meeting score milestones while others involve engaging with the level specifically like grinding the tables at a school or destroying the directories found in Mall. These goal levels all have collectibles to find while exploring the level too such as the letters to spell SKATE or Secret Tapes, and these help you to uncover the many areas a level has so when you start to think of what kind of combos to perform in them for high scores, you’ll have already had a decent tour of its many locations. Some stages take the form of small competitions instead, the player having three rounds to get as many points as they can each time. These are often the skate park levels that don’t need to lay out potential combo routes or show you hidden areas quite as much, and the break from the goal formula is interesting if a bit easy to win.

Once you do wrap up all the levels and goals for the main single-player mode though, there is still a lot left to do. You can create your own skaters, build your own skate parks with a fairly strong level editor, and if you want to buy more boards or outfits, you can engage with the game’s absurd amount of challenges. By performing certain actions, reaching milestones, and just engaging with parts of the game like the multiplayer or creative modes, you can complete these challenges and earn cash for the in-gmae store. Some are tied to playing as specific skaters, recognizable faces from the franchise’s history like Tony Hawk, Kareem Campbell, and Chad Muska all present along with some new blood to representing the modern skating scene as well. However, each of these characters having to upgrade their stats by collecting the hidden stat points in the levels is an unfortunate form of padding, and with over 700 challenges split across all the different modes and characters, it’s hard to be motivated to try and unlock them all. They’re nice to get passively, but their number makes it a daunting task with little reward in the same way getting all the unique gaps in levels seems to be. This feels like content there for those who would like it though rather than something that hurts the experience with its presence, the single-player offering enough with its solid gameplay and structuring before you even think of chasing the challenges.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 may not have as pronounced of a rebellious attitude as games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 and Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, but it also trims some of the bloat those games began to accumulate when it comes to abilities and features. While some skateboarding techniques like being able to getting off your board to add short periods of free walking to a combo and the Spacewalk move that lets you regain speed during a manual were unfortunately trimmed, it hasn’t quite lost its irreverence with goofy tricks that would be impossible in real life and some unusual set pieces in levels like a charging bull that can run you over add a bit of spice to the action. Realism may determine how a specific area’s textures look, but the skateboarders still leap about and string together abilities with superhuman ease rather than being limited to the stiff quick tricks you would see in real life. There is a strange stylistic choice where the game occasionally uses distortion effects to imply the action in this game is some sort of computer simulation or perhaps a manifestation of old footage. The unspoken implication seems to be that the game is a recreation or reproduction of the past, the presence of the distortions associated with this understated aesthetic perhaps justifying why elements from a twenty year old game are now being presented as if they’re from the current time. However, the most common place this manifests is also one of Vicarious Vision’s few brand new additions to the Tony Hawk formula and a very welcome one. If you wipe out while skating, the game fast forwards through what could have been a few seconds of your skater needing to recover, the player back in the action almost a second after an unfortunate spill. While you still get the punishment of having losing out on the points from the dropped combo, the fact so little time is spent on your skaterboarder bailing allows for a more dynamic pace with little downtime, something that benefits the flow of the game’s short innings quite well.

The multiplayer benefits from the smoothness of the skating mechanics as well. Players are able to compete in a variety of modes such as Trick Attack where you try to get the most points total in 2 minutes, Combo Mambo where you try to get the biggest single combo possible in 2 minutes, and more unusual modes like Graffiti where you focus less on your score and more about claiming objects in the level by touching them while performing tricks. Some modes can only played offline like H-O-R-S-E where you keep trying to outscore the other players until someone fails, but having the fluid gameplay turn competitive can squeeze many more hours of the title’s excellent gameplay. Sadly, the online multiplayer is structured in a strange way where random levels are picked and you must play every available mode before you leave. Not only might you get stuck in a place like Burnside for a while, but some modes like Score Challenge where you need to hit a very low score threshold to win are over so quick they are barely competitive. Offline multiplayer is free to be played as you desire and shows the potential of its better modes like Trick Attack, so hopefully a patch can adjust the way online is played to better help the interesting modes shine.

Almost as important as the skateboarding in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series is the licensed soundtrack, the mix of ska, punk, metal, and hip hop suiting the action excellently. Goldfinger’s “Superman” is an incredibly iconic song from the original game’s soundtrack and returns to spearhead a track list of more modern music, with some highlights that match the game’s tone while still sounding excellent being “All Souls’ Day” by The Ataris and “Afraid of Heights” by Billy Talent. Lesser known bands share space with big names like Dead Kennedys, Papa Roach, Rage Against the Machine, and A Tribe Called Quest, and while not every song is spectacular, there is definitely a good set of backing tracks to keep your blood pumping as you build up massive combos. In most every way, it really does feel like the original Tony Hawk games have finally been polished up to match the style and substance of the games that came after while still containing some modern touches like the updated soundtrack and visuals.

THE VERDICT: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 +2 may still have a few weak levels lingering about from the source material, but for the most part, the amazing remaster of their content has updated two classic but antiquated games into an excellent combo-focused skateboarding experience. The trick execution and chaining can be executed fluidly and breaks away from reality in the right way to make it more enjoyable to play, many stages laid out to really let you explore how to best earn the highest combos possible. A strong soundtrack, well structured single player, and competitive multiplayer modes complement the finely tuned mechanics to make this an excellent action game even if a skateboarding game normally wouldn’t appeal to a player, and its odd quirks in its online and other small areas can’t hamper this return to form for the Pro Skater series.

And so, I give Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 for PlayStation 4…

A GREAT rating. While some old level design concepts and a reliance on challenges and skill point collection to pad out the extra content mean it’s not quite on the level of some of the series’s best titles, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 +2 does a remarkable job in modernizing the small and basic levels of the games it’s updating. The series has a whole isn’t entirely solid, but this remake could stand beside most of the games up to Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland in terms of mechanical strength and how conducive most of its levels and designs are to the arcade style score chasing gameplay. Building up enormous high scores is incredibly satisfying because of how it mixes together the natural flow of chaining together different tricks with paying off your knowledge of level design and combo routes. The music makes the action more exhilarating, and the goals set up in the single player or the competitiveness of multiplayer help to draw out not just the motivation to play better, but the gradual growth of your personal abilities. More stages like NY City that mix combo potential with interesting stage concepts as well as some of the skating options like the Spacewalk that were trimmed needlessly would certainly benefit the game, but a remake is bound to what it’s trying to reimagine, and the game did a commendable job updating that content without completely destroying the nostalgic elements people would still want to see.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 stands as an example of how to update antiquated titles in a series without altering them beyond recognition. The options of titles made after the original games are transplanted into the recognizable locations, the single player carries on the structure of the old games’ original modes, and the roster contains many familiar skaters. However, new skaters and music tracks add to what was brought over, challenges give you things to shoot for, and the custom options of future titles find their way in to ensure that the degree of content offered helps it feel like a modern title in more than just its graphical integrity. Vicarious Visions did a superb job rejuvenating both of the dated titles it adapted and the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise itself, recapturing the lost magic of a series that made skateboarding games into one of the most enjoyable members of the video game sports genre.