Tony Hawk's Project 8 Review (X360)

Gameplay

The gameplay is much the same as before, but you have a new trick up your sleeve in the “nail the trick” mode. By pressing in the analog sticks, the game zooms in on your feet and goes into slow motion. You then use the sticks to control your feet and perform different moves. Throwing a few of these into the middle of a combo boosts your score significantly and it is a very nice addition to the multitude of other moves and techniques introduced into the series over the years. Everything works very smoothly and THPS vets will feel right at home. I will say that it seems a little harder to keep your balance in this game than in the past, but that is probably a good thing.

Xbox Live Play

In a surprise move, the online multiplayer actually allows you to play on the full city map rather than just one area. This is both a blessing and a curse, however, because with only 8 players online you might not ever actually see the people you are playing with. Everyone just goes to their favorite spots and does their thing. When setting up your game, you can choose to limit the play area to a handful of sections rather than the whole thing, but the fact it is offered at all is very impressive. As far as the online goes, all of the same games as we had last year are offered again, and it is all very fun.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is easily the best looking game in the series. That is to be expected, though, since it was built from the ground up to be on the next-gen systems and isn’t just a high-res version of an Xbox game like we got last year with THAW. The lighting and the water and the special effects all look fantastic. The character models are also very detailed this year and, despite some somewhat scary looking faces, the characters look great. The animation is also better and smoother than ever since a lot of it was replaced by new motion-captured animation and a new physics engine has been implemented. The framerate drops here and there, but it doesn’t usually affect gameplay. It just looks funky.

The sound is also very good and keeps up the high standard of the audio presentation in Tony Hawk games quite nicely. There is a lot of voice work from pro skaters as well as actor/skater Jason Lee, and it is all fairly well done. The soundtrack is decent, but with custom soundtracks on the Xbox 360 you won’t be listening to the in-game soundtrack too often.

Bottom Line

Overall, Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is easily better than the THUG and THAW games and stands right up there among the best the series has to offer. It is sort of odd to think that the last three games are really the down point in the series, because I played all of them and liked them quite a bit, but compared to Project 8 and the first four THPS games, THUG and THAW are seriously lacking something. If you were turned off of the series over the last three years, Project 8 will bring you back. The level design is absolutely amazing, and the gameplay is as solid and perfect as ever. It features a very well thought out and realistic career mode as well as some fantastic online multiplayer so you really can’t go wrong here. Tony Hawk’s Project 8 puts the series back on the right track and is highly recommended.