Tony Hawk''s Project 8 for Xbox 360

I remember buying the original Tony Hawk the week it came out and playing the heck out of it. Since I've been playing the series like mad ever since the release, I am known as the best Tony Hawk player ever to my friends. Well, there is something now blocking my crown, and that thing is Tony Hawk's Project 8. Project 8 has completely redesigned the game making it look and feel completely different.

So what's so different about this game? Well they cleaned up the movement textures, they made the challenges different, they changed the look of the graphics, they made the game slower and more controlled. Yes, pretty much everything about this except for the design of tricks in the long run, is different. So let's start with the story, even though it's a pretty cruddy one. You are a skater in a small town and then a bunch of pro skaters come to town and Tony Hawk makes an event called "Project 8." You start at place 200 and try to make it to the top 8 and then be in the final competition with Tony Hawk.

You get to customize your player, but the customization is no where near as deep as the last one. You have the choice between a few different character types including the gothic dude, the little kid, and a few others. Once you pick your character, you can pick out some clothes for him or her. There aren't really any goofy clothes or any cool looking clothes to pick, they are pretty much all just skater clothes that look pretty generic. You can also change your character's hair and some facial features.

So once you pick your character, you are just thrown into a big world. American Wasteland through you into a big world, but you didn't really feel like it was a one world because there was only one way to make it to and fro each world, and that was just through a door. When you went through the door it would load, so it felt like they connected the world, but each area was a different level. In this game you are actually in a big town where everything is connected. You can see different areas from high buildings and you can get into different sections of the town through multiple spots without load times. On the top of the screen you have a compass, this compass points to your goals. When you get to the area the compass points to, you will see a person, or an icon there. Press X to start the goal.

The goals in this game are unlike any of the ones in the past. You have a variety of types of goals and and each one has different requirements, there are three ways to complete the goal, AM, pro, and sick. The AM one can be done with a fair deal of challenge from beginners, the Pro one can be done by people who have played the games before, but the sick ones are generally pretty tough, and even those who are veterans to the series will sometimes have difficulty. Here's a scale of a challenge may look like:

AM: Nail 50,000 points in a minute
Pro: Nail 300,000 points in a minute
Sick: Nail 1,000,000 points in a minute

Or if you are in a contest it may look like this:
AM: Get to the second round
Pro: Make it to the third round
Sick: Don't get eliminated

There are over 200 challenges in the game and it will take a long time to get through all of them, especially if you are doing sick. You will be faced with quite a few different challenges through the game and it never really loses it's fun. The reason you would want to finish goals on sick is because you will get a better rank on the project 8 team, and at the end you will be trying to get to first place.

Here are the basic goals you will do in the game:
Photo shoot: Someone will tell you to do a trick off or over something so they can get a picture of you. The difference in the difficulty of tricks from AM to sick can be quite a big difference in challenges.

Nail a trick: Nail a trick is something new in the series. Here's what you do: Click the left and right joystick down to execute a slow motion and close up view on the board. Then different directions on the different sticks do different tricks. Up on the right stick does a shove-it. Left on the left stick does a flip trick. In mid air you can either hold a trick, like holding up to do a 360 shove it or if you keep going, a 540 shove it etc. Or you can switch the trick in the middle of the trick by letting go of up and then pressing something like left on the left stick to switch from the shove it to a flip trick. You can only do this when the board's grip tape is directly up or the graphics on the bottom of the board are directly up. So like if you press up on the left stick to do a hardflip, when the graphic on the board is up you can press left to flip it over to it's regular side.

Video-taping you challenge: These challenges can be pretty difficult at times. There is a guy that is video taping you and he tells you what trick to do and at the top of the screen it tells you how to do it. Do the trick and another trick will appear, get through these tricks as fast as possible. As you progress, the tricks get harder and harder to do.

Pro challenges: You go up to a pro in the game and he will talk to you for a while telling you what he or she wants you to do. These are generally pretty easy and obviously vary in what they want you to do, but they usually involve you getting to a place and doing a combo or a line. These challenges are set to be the same difficulty so you will not have the AM, pro and sick to worry about.

Chalk challenges: At various parts of the city you will see chalk markings. These chalk markings were apparently someone else's best line. Start these combos by doing what it tells you to do, whether it be manual, get big air, grind, or wallplant through the line. The farther or higher you get, the better rank you get.

Bail challenges: These are pretty fun. Once you get to a certain line of these challenges, the game will automatically just make you fall. The goal varies on what you are doing in your fall, but since you can control where you fall, they have you fall into gates, hit targets, and even land in a dumpster from high distance. Some of the best crashes in any game.

Classic goals: Every part of the city has a person you can talk to that will give you a classic goal. These goals are like the older games where they show you a bunch of goals to do and you have to complete in the level like: Get high, pro, and sick score, collect combo (a series of letters to get in a combo), collect skate (a series of letters that appear through the level), and various other things to collect or smash into. This added feature almost makes it feel like you get two games in one.

Move things around goals: These are my least favorite. In these you have to move around different parts of a skate park to make it so you can get to a certain spot, or make a certain line possible.

Owned goals: These goals have you do a combo, but you have to go to all of these places they tell you to and keep your combo.

Poster goals: These goals have you get from one place to another. There is a giant beam of light on the level where to go and you have to pass through 3 of these beams

Races: Sometimes you will have to do races where you have to go through different sections of the level while beating other people. Gain speed by doing tricks.

Competitions: Competitions are pretty self explanatory. Do as well as you can to get an overall ranking.

As you do goals through the game, more goals appear and your rank goes down on the list of 200 people. Towards the end of the game, which takes roughly 5 hours to beat if you just want to beat it quickly, or abot 10 if you want to get the best ending. You also unlock more decks, skaters, and ability to purchase different specials at the store. You also get sponsored by different companies.

The currency of the game is a little thing called the Stoken. To get Stokens you can either bump into a person and steal their Stokens, or you can do tricks and people will give you Stokens. If you bump into a person, they will chase you down and try to tackle you. Honestly, they made it too easy to steal Stokens from people because the people are so much slower than you. I wish that Stokens were the national currency of the US; they are so easy to come by.

In the other games in the series, you would be in the middle of a combo and you would have to stop it because you wouldn't have enough speed. Suppose you are in a manual and you ollie back into a manual; your speed will increase. This goes for grinds as well.

There are some glitches in the game, but in the long run, there aren't nearly as many as the last one. In this one I've had a few times where my guy randomly bailed, and even a few times my guy just started to float in mid air.

The physics engine has greatly improved in this game. Things seem to be moving at the speed they should and also falling in the speed they should. The game includes some of the best ragdoll physics I have seen in a game. When your guy crashes, he will just fly all over the place breaking all kinds of bones in his body (showing how many bones you broke at the top left of the screen) and it just looks absolutely painful.

By the end of the game you will have unlocked new levels, (but unfortunately there are no classic levels), new guys, (since it's by the makers of Guitar Hero you can even get the Grimm Reaper you got from beating Guitar Hero), new tricks, and new decks.

A new added feature is likely to draw a lot of people in to play this a lot longer. In this game there is a leaderboard for mostly every challenge in the game and your stats get thrown onto Xbox live where you can compete against other people to try to get the best time/score in a goal. There is also an online leaderboard for the xbox live multiplayer.

The online multiplayer is pretty similar to American Wasteland's. Here are the game variants that you can play online:
Trick attack: highest score at the end of the round wins
Score Challenge: First to a certain score wins.
Combo Mambo: Player who busts the biggest combo after the set time wins.
Combo Challenge: First person to score a combo at a certain amount of points wins.
Horse: (not available online) One person goes and then another person tries to match the amount of points as the last trick.
Walls: Keep your combo going to make a wall behind your skater longer and then try to box people inside the wall.
Free skate: Just go around and skate, this is just for fun.

The online multiplayer is a blast, especially with the leaderboards! The game holds up pretty well online but does have an occasional slowdown here and there.

The game has a totally different feel to it, the camera is way closer, the movements are slower and more realistic, and it's much harder to get crazy combos. They realized that American Wasteland's story was way too easy, so they made this a challenge for anyone. They cleaned up everything that was wrong with the last one, and even things that weren't wrong, and made this the perfect Tony Hawk game.

This is truly the first next gen skateboarding game on the 360. The graphics are absolutely stunning. There are so many different people on the street and so many pros and every face is detailed very well and you will rarely be going around saying, "Hey, I've seen that guy a lot before," because of all the different characters in the game. They took everything into consideration with this game. When you are skating switch, your character actually looks like he is skating switch. With grabs, you can see your guy grabbing his board. The game is so amazingly detailed that you can see the wheel's moving! Everywhere you go in the game, you will be seeing new textures and new looking buildings and plants. The game's graphics, at no point ever get repetitive!

The sound in the game is also amazing. You have sounds of every little skateboarding sound you could imagine, perfected! When you bail you hear the sound of your guy slamming against the ground and his bones breaking, which can be a little disturbing. Every challenge you go to where you need to talk to a person will have voice-overs and believe me, that's a lot of voice-overs. As you skate you will be hearing people talking to you all the time telling you that you are doing good, these voices are kinda repeated quite a bit, but there are still a ton of these and you will be hearing different ones all the time. There's a huge soundtrack that even includes some songs from Guitar Hero 2. Is that enough for sound? I mean everything with the sound is nearly flawless except for a few annoying songs, and the fact that some of the skate lingo is a little cheesy and not used anymore. An odd thing they did was also add quite a few cuss words to this one and you will be hearing repeated use of the "S" word constantly.

I can't stop playing this game, it is absolutely stunning! The series has changed in a radical way and the result is radical! With the change in the difficulty, anyone from a novice to a pro can play this game and have a great time with it and it is a great intro to the series! So my recommendation? Go out and buy this game right now! This is the best skateboarding game of all time.