Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

October 24,2007 - The Tony Hawk series has been around just shy of ten years, and while many would argue that it's gone downhill since the fourth installment, Neversoft's incremental changes have kept a lot of people coming back year after year. This year's installment, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, adds a lot of new features, and while some are welcome additions, most of them make the gameplay feel awkward or broken. Proving Ground has enough worthwhile content to satisfy fans, but there's nothing here to convince anyone that the Tony Hawk series isn't just a mere shadow of its former self.

Proving Ground is supposed to be all about choice. You start by either choosing a preset character or creating your own with an impressive amount of options. After that you're dropped into the game-world consisting of Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore which are connected by short bridges. You'll then have a choice between three different career paths. In "Career" you do photo shoots for magazines, make mainstream skate videos, and eventually become a skateboarding superstar. "Hardcore" is where you skate for yourself only. You'll knock other skateboarders off of their boards and claim territory. "Rigger" is for the builders who create and modify objects and then skate them.

The game breaks down each lifestyle into episodes with different professional skaters. In the episode with Stevie Williams you'll learn the new Nail The Manual mechanic and how to take pictures of yourself for a magazine. Nail The Manual is a way to rack up points using the sticks to manual in slow motion, but the controls are too sensitive . It ends up feeling like manualing the normal way is a better idea. To take a picture you must first position the camera, and then make sure to do your assigned trick in the frame of the camera. Once you skate into frame perspective shifts from you to the camera lens and time slows down. It's very disorienting and really breaks up the flow. After you take the picture you must land the trick, assuming you can recover and remember what you were doing right before time slowed down. Taking pictures for a magazine isn't a bad idea in itself, but having you do it yourself while you're doing a trick feels really weird, and spending time positioning the camera and shooting pictures slows down the pace when all you want to do is skate.

Although a couple of the new additions in Proving Ground are beneficial, most of them end up falling flat. One cool addition is the Aggro Kick that you learn from Mike V in the "Hardcore" career path. Aggro Kick helps you pump your leg faster and get more speed quickly. It's great for getting around the three cities in a timely manner or getting a quick burst of speed right before a jump. Another fun addition is bowl skating. In bowls you'll get to "carve" which basically means skate across a ramp rather than up it, and "slash" grind by grinding the lip of a ramp and coming back down. Bowl skating slows down the pace of the other parts of the game and is smoother, but almost an entire episode focuses on these two mechanics that are really only minor editions.

Unfortunately, these are the only two worthwhile additions to the Tony Hawk repertoire. The episode with Bam Margera has you climbing up buildings and shimmying across wires Prince of Persia style, but this isn't an action game, so naturally the mechanics are sketchy. You'll have to do a lot of this platforming, and the controls are unresponsive and inaccurate to the point of feeling broken, making it an exercise in frustration. This isn't the only new feature that feels broken, though. The worst of the career paths by far is "Rigger" because it consists almost entirely of malfunctioning and awkward gameplay mechanics. A lot of the goals in Rigger have you building your way from point A to point B, which basically means you build a bunch of rails connected to each other. The level editor that you'll spend a lot of time with doesn't have that many options and isn't very intuitive, so it gets monotonous quickly. Another episode has you modifying objects so that they become skate-able. Basically, you select an object like a lamp post in the editor, and this changes their form. This sounds simple, but there are a lot of issues where the little hammer that you use to select objects won't respond to your controls. There's one goal in particular where the hammer just won't go where you want it, and it really hurts the experience.

Regardless of these new goals, the old gameplay mechanics that made Tony Hawk so great in the first place are still here. You still have manuals, reverts, natas spins, and the Nail The Trick mode that was introduced in Project 8 where you go into slow motion and use both analog sticks to create your own flip-tricks. This system has been expanded with Nail The Grab, although it doesn't feel quite as inspired or full-featured as its flip-trick counterpart. This still feels entirely like a Tony Hawk game, and that's mostly a good thing. If you're a fan of how Tony Hawk games have played in the past, you'll still have a good time fooling around in the environments and completing some of the smaller challenges.

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