Tony Hawk's Proving Ground - Review

Added November 15th, 2007 by Justin McBride

Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground is the latest in the long-running Tony Hawk series, often credited for starting the extreme sports genre. With recent installments though, the once highly lauded series has been knocked because of its overall lack of change. Last year’s Project 8 was viewed by many to be a step in the right direction. Proving Ground, on the other hand, is more of a sidestep than a significant step forward.

Proving Ground begins like many skateboarding game predecessors, starring you as an up and coming skater trying to perfect his craft and move up in the eyes of his fellow skaters. You begin by creating…well, creating isn’t exactly the right word since the create-a-skater mode doesn’t allow you much freedom in that respect. By only allowing you to choose a pre-made skater with limited clothing and accessory combinations, a great deal of the personalization is lost.

Once you’ve completed the creation of your character, you begin your long rise to the top on the rain-slicked streets of Philadelphia. Straying from the singular mindedness of previous Tony Hawk games, Proving Ground offers three branching paths for you to take in any order you like, offering different skills to unlock, new challenges to face, and of course, different objectives to tackle. There’s the career path, which sees you, for the most part, filming skate videos and shooting photos for skateboarding magazines. Then there’s the rigger path, which consists primarily of forging your own impromptu skate parks to complete objectives and seeking out skating opportunities by way of climbing up buildings that others would normally miss. Finally, there’s the hardcore path, in which you return to the essence of the sport, learning new skills such as bowl carving and the speed boosting aggro moves.

Quite a few new features, skills and modes come into play in Proving Ground. Building on the Nail the Trick mode introduced in last year’s Project 8, Nail the Manual and Grab modes were added to the formerly flip trick only mode. Transitioning from Nail the Trick to Manual or Grab is handled seamlessly by pressing and holding one of the triggers. Nailing manuals feels a bit rough around the edges, but grabs feel just right.

One of the biggest additions is the rigger menu. Introduced and later expanded in the rigger career path, this menu allows you to construct your own objects, such as quarter pipes and kickers, allowing you to create mini skate parks pretty much anywhere you like. Well, things don’t always work as well as they should. Placing objects exactly where you need them to be is a bit harder than it really needs to be due to a somewhat convoluted control scheme. Despite all this, the rigger menu can be put to very good use in the skate lounge (a large space for building your own custom skate park).

Most objectives can be completed at three different levels, Am, Pro and Sick difficulties, and feature steeper requirements for victory as you move up the ladder allowing you to challenge yourself as much or as little as you see fit. As far as the actual objectives themselves, things range from fun to incredibly frustrating. Many are pretty straightforward and simple enough to accomplish, but some are often much more complicated and troublesome than they need to be.

Throughout the career path, you’ll be tasked with taking photos of yourself performing tricks in front of a camera. Well, in practice, things just don’t come together. Setting up your camera for each photo session is handled by way of the rigger menu, meaning it’s a bit confusing to get the camera in the exact right spot you want it to be from the outset. Once it’s in place, lining up your skater to perform the necessary tricks inside the tiny bubble is difficult. Once inside the bubble, the view of the action switches to the camera’s perspective and slows down time to allow you to snap the picture by clicking in the right stick. Naturally, having the camera suddenly shift to this new angle is jarring enough to sometimes throw off your timing and make landing your trick that much harder.

All these careers are linked together by a bar, which fills up as you progress through any of the three paths. Once this bar fills up, the game’s true story advances. As this bar continues to fill, you’ll unlock such milestones as gaining a shoe sponsor, joining a team and culminating into you forming your own skate team. The main story, from your humble beginnings to the formal ending as the final credits isn’t very long, clocking in at about six hours or so, but that’s not to say the game is short. Quite the contrary actually, there’s a lot to see and do within the suitably massive game world.

Throughout the three interconnected cities, you’ll find a bevy of objectives to complete such as line challenges, in which you must perform a trick on a series of objects without losing your combo. In addition, you’ll find a number of markers scattered about, in which you must perform a specified trick, ranging from manuals to wallrides from one marker to the next. In addition, there’s the classic mode, which gives you a certain objective to complete in a short span of time. New to the series is the dot collecting Hawk Man mode, which can be fun, but some sporadic glitches can pop up and cause frustration.

The multiplayer modes here are pretty much carried over from Project 8. Players can section off certain areas of the city and free skate around the area with up to eight players simultaneously. Specific online modes such as score and combo challenges can then be launched from free skate at any time. That being said, there’s plenty here that will keep the Tony Hawk faithful entertained for a quite a while.

The graphics here are pretty much an improvement over what you’ve seen in Project 8. The character models are decent overall but you’ll certainly encounter your fair share of strange and downright creepy looking characters. The world itself looks good, sporting some nice lighting effects and substantial detail where it counts but other areas seem to be lacking in detail to make up for it. The soundtrack on the other hand is quite good, featuring a wide selection of a number of different genres from Punk rock to hip-hop.

It’s odd that a game with so much new content could feel so familiar, but such is the case with Proving Ground. The series continues to remain in a relative creative rut, continuously circling, almost as if it’s afraid to break new ground, seemingly subscribing to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy. Well, the new additions and changes are interesting, but its arcadey brand of skating is growing more and more stale with each new installment. I think it’s time for Neversoft to go back to the drawing board and seriously attempt to innovate if they ever expect this Hawk to fly as high as it once did.

Pun totally intended.