Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 (PS4)

From it’s start back in 1999, the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series managed to release a new game every year up to 2010, and at first this was to its benefit. Already the series hit on a solid concept of taking the real world sport and focusing it more on smoothly linking together long series of tricks that could make it appealing to gamers with no interest in extreme sports, and gradually honing that gameplay and adding new options to it sustained the early iterations. Once it became difficult to iterate on realistically and the series started pursuing unusual gimmickry like skateboard controllers though, it waned in popularity hard. With Activision’s rights to use Tony Hawk himself set to expire in 2015 though, Activision got developer Robomodo to throw together a game that could hopefully hearken back to its glory days. Unfortunately, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 was also rushed out so it could release before those rights expired, and it certainly can be felt as what could have been a return to form instead failed to nail its basics and thus lead to a harsher backlash than if the series had gone out with its continued dabbles in gimmickry.

 

Like in the more successful installments of the franchise, the focus of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 is on making use of a level’s geometry to string together long strings of tricks, the player needing to make sure to maintain their balance while grinding on rails or edges and traveling between accommodating pieces of the environment with manuals where the board is tipped while moving and thus must be balanced as well. An odd choice is made off the bat with how grinding and manual balance is handled, since rather than losing your balance leading to the player wiping out and losing the points accrued in the combo, it often instead safely concludes the combo. This can lead to the odd feeling of a grind high up on something like a wire ending and then the game doesn’t let you grind as you fall towards an object below, but it does remove some of the considerations given to how you pick your tricks and when you deem it too risky to continue. Manuals and grinds have been simplified to the point there are no special manual tricks so they really are mostly used for mid-combo travel across open ground and grinds require you to jump and grind again to change the trick. Multipliers are key to getting more points from a chain of tricks and each new move added to an ongoing combo will increase that multiplier, and since there are diminishing returns on repeated tricks, having two of the most consistent ways of adding to your combo so threadbare is certainly felt.

Flips and grab tricks end up becoming incredibly important and to some degree this is well earned. Mistiming a flip of the board or holding a grab trick too long can lead to your skater wiping out, and while the best time to use these is often after getting a good degree of air off of a ramp, you can jump while grinding or performing a manual and sneak in some flips and grabs. These aerial maneuvers are surprisingly kind, the animation sometimes seeming to suggest you’d bail if you land before the trick completes but still letting you solidly land. Forgiveness isn’t inherently bad, but it does lead to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 combos feeling like they end under unusual or sometimes unfair circumstances. For example, after launching off a halfpipe to do some aerial tricks, as you come back down you are meant to do a revert so you can transition into a manual to keep the combo going, but the input reading will sometimes seem to fail to output the manual after. Certain objects can also catch on your skater if you bump into them, and while it should seem like the skateboarder could just move a bit to get free you’ll instead get locked into a few repeated bumps before it finally fixes itself. Trying to move in midair can be difficult as well despite hopping between rails and objects while grinding being key to continuing to find conducive combo-continuing options, although nothing beats moments of outright stuttering that interrupt the flow of play.

 

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 was originally released with the intention of a persistent online connection being maintained. This would allow other players to skate around the same levels as you and you could compete with them in multiplayer modes like competitions to earn the highest score, a mode where doing a trick can fire projectiles at opponents with the attempt to wipe them out, and a mode where you need to steal a crown from each other and can only score points while wearing it. There is no offline multiplayer though, and when the servers were shutdown, this actually lead to the game refusing to let you even play normal levels and single player missions unless you turn off your PS4’s internet connection before playing. It is odd that the stuttering exists even with the internet completely disabled, but there are moments of massive slowdown elsewhere such as a flagrant case in a mission involving large ball-shaped sheep you need to shove around. Split second trick execution and balance management having any sort of interruption already jeopardizes a core appeal of the game, but you can still get by most of the time once you become accustomed to its quirks.

 

A few ideas added to your repertoire are sound in theory but not always in execution. Linking together enough tricks in a combo will eventually build up power for special moves, but in order to use them you’ll first need to end your current combo, this leading to wasted time in missions where getting a single high scoring combo is the focus. Once the limited time special mode is active, regular tricks are replaced with slightly flashier high value versions, this technically adding new manual options in but not in a way that can be fluidly integrated or requires much thought from the player on how they can be tied into the combo. The slam is an idea with better intentions though, as a press of triangle will lead to your skater quickly slamming downwards. If you get more air launching off a halfpipe than desired you can quickly bring yourself down, this helpful since many missions are not only timed but can can feature rather tight requirements if you want to earn the higher ratings for completing them. However, triangle is also your grind button, and since the game will let you press it before contact is made with a rail, it is often smart to do so in advance so you don’t miss the window of opportunity. If you press triangle early though you’ll slam down before where the natural arc of your movement would have brought you, and in later levels with dangerous drops or smaller grindable objects this can lead to a slam causing unintended outcomes. You can set the slam to at least require two presses of triangle, but oddly enough useful options like leveling out your board after launching off a ramp so you can reach new ground when you head back down are absent and escaping pools can sometimes be overcomplicated for it.

It is a shame so many of the basics have mild issues you’ll have to adjust to in order to get the kinds of huge combos and reliable movement needed for the game’s often strict mission requirements, but perhaps even sadder is that the levels you skate in are often fairly well laid out for play. The spacing of the objects makes identifying combo lines fairly easy and give opportunities to shift from grinds, ramp launches, and manual space so it’s not just about trying to extract as much potential from a small but conducive area of the level. Some are laid out like skate parks, others embrace ideas like busy rooftops, and some get outlandish like a sci-fi level called Asteroid Belt where you are in outer space, but on the surface the 10 available levels have solid layouts and some like Mountain even shake things up as it has a downhill focus rather than the more typical open plan seen elsewhere. Almost every level adds in a weird complication in the form of power-ups though, and in some like Asteroid Belt, they are both required for consistent movement across the stage but are disruptive while doing so. Asteroid Belt’s low gravity lets you clears jumps that would otherwise be impossible and your options would be limited if you don’t utilize them, but the height of the jump in a level with many instant deaths due to easy out-of-bounds leaps makes getting a clean combo more irritating than it should be. Some like a shrink or growth power-up elsewhere barely impact things thankfully and the rooftops actually get an interesting one with the double jump power that is used at your discretion to assist as needed. The stage design often still gets to shine well enough, admittedly because some stages like School III and The Bunker are retools or lightly expanded versions of levels from previous games, but again we hit on the formula having a few ideas out of whack and thus the play suffers for it some. Even the music is a double-edged sword, the game actually having a pretty strong selection of punk, rock, and hip hop music tracks but no way to customize your playlist, skip songs you don’t like, or even identify the musician or track name.

 

For your single player mission-focused play you’ll likely want to stick to one skater since the stat boosts earned for completing them are character dependent and often required to eventually overcome how weak you are early on in doing simple things like rotating while in the air. There is a mix of real world skaters, Tony Hawk and his son Riley joined by people like Andrew Reynolds and Leticia Bufoni, but there are also guest stars like rapper Lil Wayne and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to pick as well. Oddly enough if you want to make a custom character though you overwrite an actual playable character with your creation and their appearance is made by combining bodies and heads from unlockables you earn while skating, the skateboard designs and player emblems also earned in a similar manner. Each of the ten levels has a group of goals to complete, the game even allowing you to make some in the decent level creator mode. Some of these are completed during free skate, there being no timer for things like collecting the floating letters to spell SKATE, stringing together a consistent trick string to collect the COMBO letters all in one combo, or breaking some level-specific object like the explosives in the Wild West level or hitting tiki statues at Bonfire Beach. When you start doing missions either by finding them in the level or accessing them through the touchpad menu though you’ll find a mix of good ideas and boring challenges.

 

Some missions focus on the core play like getting a high score or combo or hitting score thresholds despite being limited to specific areas or denied certain tricks. Others though try to get more creative to varying results. Hawkman missions are interesting conceptually, the player needing to collect colored orbs by doing the right trick through them, but these are often laid out so only one combo string can possibly complete it in time and they often require you to precisely land a grind at just the right spot or fly through the air in just the right way so retries will likely be constant as you attempt to do such strings perfectly. Others like knocking giant balls (or those earlier mentioned giant sheep) out of pools don’t even really ask for smart movement but just require bumping everything out quickly enough. Some ideas have potential like the challenges where you earn points based on the distance you grind, manual, or how much time is spent in the air and it is multiplied by the number of tricks in your combo, but it’s easy to slip in basic flips so it’s not too challenging to clear once you realize the basic exploit. The challenge where the game instructs you to do certain tricks is too basic, especially since you can do the more complicated grabs even while doing a small hop in place, and the restrictive boundaries for some missions end up with the player forced to do very safe and bland combos to win. A mode where your head gradually inflates and blows up if you don’t land high value tricks often enough is a bit of an inspired form of play though, incentivizing frequent but high scoring trick chains to offset a loss that isn’t as straightforward as beating a timer, especially since the timers in the game will allow you to keep playing so long as you’re in a combo but the head detonation will interrupt combos if you let it swell too much. Missions where you collect items that grant points based on your combo’s size do better mix movement and trick execution though, but overall most of the missions hamper their potential with tight limitations or actually need more limitations since they funnel you into using unexciting options to win.

THE VERDICT: Despite having plenty of previous games to reference for how the combo-focused skateboarding should work, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 flubs some of its basics and weird ideas like power-ups or quirky mission concepts can’t redeem such fundamental failures. Players can still string together large combos and the levels are usually quite conducive to them thanks to intelligent object placement, but the actual actions you take aren’t always smooth and some of the options like the slam are disruptive as the game both builds around its use but doesn’t properly account for it. With far too many of the missions weakening their appeal or potential with heavy restrictions that force out bland tactics, this skateboarding game becomes defined more by glitches and lacking options rather than the still thrilling sense of stringing together long chains of tricks that peeks through from time to time.

 

And so, I give Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. There are definitely times in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 where the problems are easier to ignore, the strong level layouts allowing for you to build up a huge satisfying combo as you pop between grinds, aerial tricks, and manuals despite their limited options. However, then that play will be interrupted as an object doesn’t agree with your skater either by bouncing them about a bit, making it hard for them to leave an area, or even causing them to phase through a bit. You might have your game freeze when picking a mission or experience an odd stutter or slowdown that interrupts play focused on quick trick changing and balance management. A level with a fine design like Asteroid Belt might sabotage itself for the sake of a gimmicky power-up or the missions might ruin their potential as they demand perfection in a game that isn’t clean enough to make that feel like a reasonable expectation. While some understandable or subjective omissions like paring down manuals to a means of conveyance rather an opportunity for additional tricks aren’t going to bring down the whole game, it is strange the special tricks are so segmented from regular abilities, not having the option to level out your board midair makes navigation more difficult, and the slam really didn’t need to be tied to the incredibly useful triangle button so that its situational importance could instead be properly embraced rather than cropping up as an unintentional interruption. Ideas like the power-ups or missions that don’t even focus on skateboarding skill feel like they’re trying to distract from the rough edges of the core play that arise, and while the skateboarding action can still provide some excitement, the game will keep taking that away from you as the disruptive elements upset the combo system’s rhythm and flow.

 

There were some good concepts for missions and even ones that would work if the game was smoother in design or didn’t add uninteresting difficulty with confinement and move removal, but really a lot of the issues likely come back to the fact this game was hastily created to avoid rights expiration rather than having the time to iron out the technical flaws and identify where things are too lean or too strict. The post-release patch did at least make the slam move less disruptive, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 seemed to have its attention in odd areas like persistent online and power-ups rather than the fundamentals. You can still taste the quality underlying some of the ideas kept from the previous skateboarding titles, but the flaws keep demanding attention and thus it ends up an uneven experience where those irritating moments undo the good will the cleaner sections struggle to try and build up.