American Wasteland isn't as good as its predecessors, but is still really fun to play.
As with Underground 2, there is both a Story Mode and a Classic Mode. In the Story Mode, you play as a 'country bumpkin' who moves from his old hometown in order to get away from it all. When he arrives in L.A., he immediately gets attacked by the locals but meets a girl named Mindy who helps him get back on his feet. Soon, he learns of a secret skate park in Beverly Hills and gets in with the locals who habit the place and works with them to make the park the 'sickest place in town'. Along the way, he runs into trouble when the true owner of the park attempts to demolish it.
American Wasteland's Story Mode generally runs the same way as the last three games' Story Modes went. You go around the city of Los Angeles and do missions for people in order to advance the story. In this case, as you progress through the story you unlock new sections of Los Angeles including Santa Monica and Downtown Los Angeles. Unlike previous games, you learn new moves as you go along. Instead of having full control over what your character wears, you have to buy it so money is key in this game. In order to earn it, you can do various side-missions all over the city. If you find a man with a dollar-sign over his head, he'll have you perform a few tricks or find some gaps in order to earn some dough.
New to the game is the ability to ride bikes. To get on a bike, get off your skateboard and press Z to get on it. You can find Rick Thorne all over the neighborhood in order to learn how to ride it. Like with the man mentioned earlier, this is another way you can earn money. The final way you can earn money is by finding a tagger named Muton and help him tag certain spots in each area. You can also design your own tag which you can use. In Classic Mode, the goal (as usual) is to do various goals in order to unlock the next area, from getting a high score to finding the 5 letters that spell SKATE. Once you do a certain amount of goals, then you can move on to the next level. Some of the levels in this mode aren't actually from past games, but it does have the Minneapolis, Chicago, and 'Mall' levels from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1.
So as mentioned earlier, the 'one-level' concept doesn't exactly work out as the game promotes it out to be. While there really are no loading screens that come up when you go to a new level, the game still needs to load them up somehow. Their solution has you go through corridors in order to get to each area and they are pretty bland. There's no other people who appear in these corridors so really it kind of becomes a chore to just get anywhere. You can also get to a new area by riding on a bus or driving a car but it's still the same thing.
I've also experienced some bugs and freezing problems while playing this game. This has mainly happened while I was playing the Story Mode. Whenever I start it up, there always comes a point after I've played the game for a while when the mission dialogue doesn't even show up. Basically what happens is that I start up a mission but then it puts me straight into the action without me knowing what is going on. No matter what I do, I can't get it to come back again so I have to exit out of the Story Mode and start it back up again. There have also been times when the game froze on me, primarily during some of the loading screens. One time, the game froze right after I beat the game and I didn't save beforehand. But the worst time was when the game froze right when I was saving, so my save file got corrupted and I had to start over. Finally, I'm not a huge fan of the fact that your character starts up not knowing many moves.I get that your character is supposed to become a better skater as he starts to find his way in L.A. but I feel that it sort of slows the game down in a way.
Perhaps the most common complaint towards this game is that it doesn't really add anything new and from a technical standpoint, that is true. Aside from the 'one-level' feature that isn't fully realized, this is generally the same game as the first Underground game, except for the Classic Mode being that is was from Underground 2. But I don't really think that's a bad thing. The formula may be the same, but I honestly can't think of any other way they could do it. The controls are still solid and are easy for anybody to pick up and play. As I've mentioned before with Underground 2, the best part about these games is that you can just skate around and don't have to worry about advancing the story. Like before, the Classic Mode will bring back memories of past games in the series and it's cool to see updated versions of old stages from the first Tony Hawk game. My only complaint with this mode is that I wish that they could've added more levels from previous games.
I didn't really have any real problems with the last two Underground games, so to put it simply American Wasteland isn't as good as its predecessors. As I mentioned earlier, I did experience some problems mainly due to bugs but if I really had to list a single complaint, it's the fact that the 'one-level' aspect that was the major thing advertised about this game is a letdown. From what I've found out, it wasn't until later titles when it would work much better. I've never seen it for myself because this was the last Tony Hawk game I've played at the time that I am writing this review. This game still has great controls and is incredibly fun to play, but I can't say it's as good as the last two Underground games.