Tony Hawk's Project 8

Author: Wil Harris
Published: 21st November 2006

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Pro skaters

The game has the usual cast of recurring Pros, and they pop up from time to time to offer you 'boss' challenges - more tricky and mind-bending than some of the standard stuff. On the list are the usual suspects, including Rodney Mullen, Mike Vallely and Bob Burnquist. It's good to see a couple of new additions though, reflecting the more serious and diverse nature of the game. Ryan Sheckler and Daewon Song are a couple of younger faces, whilst Lyn-Z Adams marks the first female pro to appear in the series.

The real-world additions to the game continue into the game's store. As you progress up the ranks, you'll get additional sponsors, in the form of skate companies like Etnies and DC, who provide you with clobber to kit out your skater with. Much of the gear is replicated from popular merchandise in real life - meaning that I was able to select a pair of low-rise green Etnies exactly like the ones I normally wear, which is slightly weird.

Branding also continues with your Nokia videophone, messages which serve up alerts as to the locality of Pros and new competitions and challenges. The advertising is blatant but oddly inoffensive.

Nail that Trick

The biggest new addition to the franchise is Nail the Trick mode. This is utterly sublime. When you get some air, you can click both analogue sticks to hit a slow-motion mode that zooms the camera in on your board and feet. Using the sticks, you can manipulate each foot individually to flip the skateboard in all directions, stringing together some amazing flip combos. You can work NTTs into your standard combos for extra multiplier bonuses, and this marks a major addition to the ways of racking up super scores. There are also various challenges that make use of NTT - trying to get a Sick combo off the town hall steps using the mode is pretty darned hard, if addictive.

There are some fun new bail modes, where you can bounce and ragdoll your skater all over the shop following a particularly painful accident. Bails rack up hospital treatment costs which are incorporated into challenges - one cringeworthy challenge involves bailing on a hill run and racking up the maximum bill possible by bouncing your skater off the tarmac to within an inch of his life.

Also new are the spot challenges. These are little graffiti'd spots all over the town that illustrate a previous skater's best run. For instance, a kerb might have a series of paint marks showing the best grind length along it - equal or beat it and you can rank up. There are spot challenges for olly heights, grind distances, wallplants, you name it. These are a great addition that provide some respite from the intensity of timed challenges.

Thankfully, the game never gets so hard as to be frustrating, and doesn't have any quirks that make you throw your pad against the wall. If you fail a trick, you can hit Start and re-try it immediately, minimising the amount of time you have to spent messing around before tricks. The ability to jump straight back to the start of a challenge means you spend more time enjoying the task at hand than swearing and skating back to where you should be.

Graphics

In HD, the series looks pretty good - with a couple of caveats. Internet rumours are suggesting that the game is being rendered below 1280x720, the native Xbox HD resolution, and is instead being rendered lower and scaled up. This would seem to have some accuracy given that the graphics can look a little ropey in places, with the occasional noticeable jaggie. Also a downer are some of the character faces - Tony looks like a munster, and a couple of the other pros don't look too great either. On the plus side, there are no loading times between sections, with the entire world being seamless - and it's a big world. Nail the Trick mode looks sublime in slo-mo, and the world is generally colourful and inventive. Interestingly, the clarity of HD makes it rather simpler to identify complex combo lines than on previous iterations of the series, which makes for more exciting play.

Sound

There is an array of indie rock tracks to accompany the action, as is customary for the series. The rest of the sound design is fairly standard, with the usual grinds and bails causing appropriate thuds. What more can honestly be done?

Conclusion

Project 8 is a game that gets everything right and almost nothing wrong. Apart from the graphics looking a bit not-quite-next-gen in areas, the gameplay itself is spot on. The world is vast, with hundreds of challenges, pro challenges and spot challenges to complete - and that's quite without the fun of discovering the massive lines and free skating to beat your own personal targets. The new addition - Nail the Trick - is a big win for the series, and the ditching of the Jackass theme works immensely in its favour. Project 8 is everything THPS fans could have possibly hoped for - and it gets a deserved perfect score.