Microsoft
(360) Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
By Euric Fuselier
Jan 5, 2006, 5 :28 am

Tony Hawk is already back in my living room? Man, that guy just doesn’t leave.

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, much like its more recent predecessors, isn’t concerned so much with the core mechanics of the game as it is with what encases those mechanics. The most dramatic additions to the gameplay aren’t all that drastic, though some efforts have been made: consider the BMX, varying the experience only slightly by its handling. Some moves have been added and the gameplay tweaked, but it’s as if there was a realization a while back that what they had was good and there was little reason to muck with it. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the developers instead tried to present the same formula in new ways to make the game interesting to those who have played it so many times before.

This time around, the main addition is the story mode. Coming from somewhere not cool, which is to say anywhere in the U.S. that is not New York or California going by the standards of those in New York and California, you make your way out to the sunshine state to skate where your heroes are and to make a name for yourself. After picking from a number of characters to get on the bus to make the ride out west, my character was immediately greeted with a skateboard to the face and a young lady explaining to me that I was poached because I stood out so much. That would make sense if my preceding goals of getting a haircut and a new pair of clothes – to, you know, fit in with the cool kids – didn’t include the haircut I already had, and you will have a hard time telling me that a well-coiffed afro is anything but cool regardless. From there, you get to meet people who remind you of their innate rebelliousness by wearing shirts that say ‘Punk’ on them and do moves that you call ‘tight’ despite the fact you most likely did a number of them yourself when you were just messing around beforehand.  The main goal is to complete challenges to earn cash, gain experience, and to compete with the professionals.

The freeform movement of the game also opens up a host of possibilities. By getting off your skateboard you can climb ladders, jump over rails, and thanks to some parkour lessons – which would make an interesting game itself – you’ll be able to run up walls and jump around the cityscape like Spider-Man. As you progress, you’ll unlock new areas, and thanks to a handy bus, it’s easy to make your way from one locale to the next. Each area features people who offer you cash to perform certain tricks, shops where you can buy new items, and new people to meet and learn from. In many ways, the story mode is like a giant tutorial as you meet new people and learn their specialties in each location. Fans of the series will breeze through these, but newcomers will find the less-than-detailed instructions a bit irksome; for example, they fail to mention that most moves flow together and aren’t separate, as they seem to be when explained. The game also forces the menus and text to be widescreen, which makes the often incorrect subtitles and instructions difficult to read regardless of whether or not the mode properly fits your TV. The biggest problem is that these areas, rich with buildings to utilize and areas to discover and skate on, aren’t utilized very well; while you have time to explore between story sequences, there just isn’t all that much to do. There are the side jobs for cash and portions of the story to complete and graffiti spots to tag, but it’s all so simplistic that they serve as little more than mere distractions.

The faux attitude is also laid on very thick. I had a hard time sitting through the conversations throughout the story. For some reason you want to impress people who nickname you “Ken-sucky!” and think it’s funny. And since the text is hard to read, you can’t mute the television or you might miss some vital information needed to complete a task. At least the exaggerated pulp art used during the story sequences is nice.

There are also numerous, consistent problems. Graphical glitches are obvious and plentiful as clipping is constant and items flicker, including directional marks that show where to begin or end a trick.  While not a technical problem, the game doesn’t look very good, which is a pretty serious blow considering the increased price and its presence as a 360 launch title. When you are off your board, the fluid animations and ease with which rails and other items are tackled are matched by imprecise controls that feel too loose. There is also a human ping-pong ball effect that occurs whenever you stumble into one of the game’s many tiny areas and corners or when you bump into a person who, unlike the other person next to them, cannot be skated through and will knock you around and back a few feet. For all that the game provides, including the ability to create tracks and tags and so on along with the story mode, it just doesn’t feel refined.

To take a break from the annoying characters, I often retreated into the game’s classic mode. As the name implies, classic mode is the Tony Hawk of days of yore when you are given a few minutes to complete a number of tasks to unlock the next area. Sure, I’ve managed to play these levels before in the limited amount of time I’ve spent with Tony, but they still manage to be great timesinks. Plus Neversoft had the foresight to tie the goals in classic mode to many of the 360’s accomplishment points, and my will is very weak when it comes to keeping that particular monkey off my back.

If you’re really looking to give the game some legs, you can try out the create-a-graphic, create-a-park, and create-a-trick modes. It’s about as customizable as one can get without being able to make their own pieces with an in-game editor. While I can’t say that I was itching to try my hand at these, they’re sound inclusions and are some of the benefits from being in such a long-running series.

There is also the inclusion of online play over Xbox Live. There are numerous options to play, like free skate (no goals), slap! (whoever slaps the most wins), graffiti (tagging objects by doing tricks off them and remove friends’ tags by doing bigger combos on their tags), combo mambo (biggest combo during the limit wins), and so on. There are also more interesting modes, like shooting other players with fireballs in firefight and their version of kill the man with the ball, pot o’ gold  (only the player with the pot of gold can score points); there is also goal attack for the classic portion. For those poor souls out there without Live, there is always the inferior split-screen option; for games like this, where environment is everything, a limited view really detracts from the enjoyment. For the newcomers out there that are worried about old series pros cleaning up online, there is a ranking system that will match you with those of equal skill. In an unfortunate turn, the skater you’ve nurtured and taken through the highest ranks of skaterdom in story mode cannot be brought online.

Overall: 6.5/10

The enjoyment I have for this seventh installment (excluding the numerous handheld releases) is that I haven’t played all of them as they were released. If I had, my feeling for the series would be far more towards the level of toleration than anything else. The fundamentals are still enjoyable, and the story mode will still find a home in those more into the style of the sport, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this isn’t five years ago and I’m not playing on a Dreamcast.