THAW is just more of the same. But thats not a bad thing. After all, the Tony Hawk games dominate the genre for a reason
Anyone familiar with the Tony Hawk games knows how it all works - you make a character, progress through a story developing your skateboarding skills, complete strange goals, and then unlock some movies and secret characters, before doing it all over again.
This time, there are a couple more additions to the moveset, even though i never would have thought it possible. In earlier Hawk games, you could do the Natas spin, but now you can do several variations of it, much like you could do different fliptricks and grinds in all the other games. Another new feature is the ability to do stalls; they work just like grinds except you dont move down the rail, instead you stall in one place. Tapping off the list of new moves is the Bert slide, which is probably the most basic move in all of skateboarding, now finally available for you to play around with.
Along with those completely new moves, you also have the ability to add rolls and flips to any move on the fly. By holding either the flip trick or grab trick button and double or triple tapping the direction buttons, you can now do backflips, frontflips, and side rolls - as well as double variations of each. Probably the most glaring new gameplay feature is your ability to ride bikes. It's a nice touch, and whats even nicer is that you don't have to have any skill with a bike at all to progress through the game, its just there for you to mess around with. Oh, and i almost forgot - you can also do a few more things while on foot. While they dont really count as new moves in my book, they do add to your score, so i guess they're worth menioning. Besides the ability to spray paint your customizable tag on the walls and ground, you can now run up walls, do flips off said walls, do backflips and frontflips, throw your board and run onto it, and in the most amusingly useless feature of all time, beat people with your board like its a baseball bat.
That being said, even with all these new maneuvers and features, the game still plays exactly the same as the past few titles. Talk to people, get a goal, do an interesting combination of moves, and repeat. Strangely, it still hasn't become boring for me, i really don't know how neversoft manages to keep it fresh, but they do.
This time around, gameplay is centered in a version of Los Angeles, with areas based on Santa Monica, Hollywood, and other locales. None of which have any more then a minor cosmetic similarity to the real places, but enough so that you can beleive you're truely where the game wants you to be. All the level's are connected in a way that avoids loading screens, but makes getting to other areas very linear; each area only connects to another in one place, generally a long tunnel of sorts, wherin the only thing you can really do is grind from one side to the other. While it isn't quite what the game would have you beleive from the advertisements and the back of the box, it does get rid of most of the loading screens - you'll usually only see it when you start up and first load or start the career mode.
Continuing a trend Neversoft started several years ago, Classic mode has made it back in, albeit with several not-so-classic levels. There are two or three levels taken pretty much directly from older games, and given the same objectives you had to complete in them, (in the original format of an endless supply of two minute runs, wherein you acheive high scores and collect the hidden tape and skate letters.) but about twice as many of the levels in classic mode seem to be completely new - at least at first glance. Most of them are heavily modified versions of maps in previous games, or a combination of several levels into one larger level.
Licensed music makes it back again, and continues the trend of having an unlockable music star as a playable character. The interface lets you toggle what songs you want to hear and which ones you dont, so if you have an aversion to punk or hip hop, you can simply turn off those songs - i know i did. Personally, i found that there were only a few good songs and bands in the list, but i think a lot of the players in the market for this game will really appreciate the choice of bands and songs in the game, which features artists like Green Day and My Chemical Romance.
All in all, Tony Hawk's American Wasteland is another great game from Neversoft. The only complains i have with this game is the choice of music and the fact that it ends, and those are both very minor quibbles. Well, the game does seem horrendously short - but remember that there are 3 difficulty settings for story mode and two for classic mode, and completing both modes will unlock you more skaters to play as, so most players will probably complete the game several times.
If your a fan of skateboarding, or even any of the other extreme sports, its definately worth a buy. Just dont expect anything groundbreaking - its the same solid fun we've been playing with just a few minor tweaks for years now - and that's a very good thing.