Tony Hawk's Project 8 Review (X360)

Tony Hawk’s Project 8 brings the series back to its roots, so if the antics and silliness of the THUG games and THAW weren’t your cup of tea but you still loved the gameplay, Project 8 will make you very happy. Activision and Neversoft have delivered the best looking, most realistic, most challenging, and one of the most fun skateboarding games yet, and I am also happy to say that the level design this year is as good as it has ever been. This is a fantastic game.

Career Mode

In the career mode, you learn that Tony Hawk is looking 8 of the best skaters around to join his team. You start out ranked 200, and by completing goals you’ll move up. A nice touch is that you don’t set a difficulty level like you would in past games. Instead, each goal has specific requirements for the amateur, pro, and sick levels and you just complete whatever you can in order to advance. This system works very, very well I think, but the sick level goals are undoubtedly the most challenging we have seen in a Tony Hawk’s game so far. And that is a very good thing. The goals are much more realistic this year, which is also a very good thing. You’ll meet up with pro skaters and have to complete their challenges. You’ll enter skate competitions and have to keep crowds entertained at demos. And there are other goals that require you to grind to a certain distance or wallride up to a specified height. There are other goals where you follow a cameraman around and have to do specific tricks. There is also a set of classic goals in each area where you have to collect items, set high scores, and other things THPS fans will remember. The progression in the career mode is very well done and you have a ton of new things to do and you open up new parts of the world and meet new pros (and earn achievements) constantly.

Level Design

The level design is what really ties everything together in Project 8. If the game world wasn’t so well put together, nothing else would have mattered. Unlike THAW, which promised an open world but couldn’t deliver, Project 8 gives you free reign in a small town that is all connected. You start out in a neighborhood, and them open up a skatepark, downtown area, capital building, school, and more that are all seamlessly connected. A nice touch is that rather than having quarterpipes everywhere, the city has a fairly realistic design. There are spots where vert and big air are clearly the main objective, but the rest of the level is filled with amazing lines to grind and there are secret areas to discover all over the place. You can grind seemingly forever in this game and I absolutely love it. Another nice touch is that there are several spots in each level where you can move objects around to make your own lines. This is a fantastic idea that is very well implemented.

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