Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2x Review

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2x is the equivalent of a "director's cut" edition, containing the original product and some nominal enhancements. While the game is technically the best version of Tony Hawk 2 to date and while the addition of the Tony Hawk 1 levels is a nice touch, the game feels a little dated, whether you compare it to the rest of the Xbox lineup or the recently released Tony Hawk 3 for the GameCube and the PlayStation 2. While not a terrible game by any means, it's definitely designed to appeal to both the "hiding under a rock for the past year" set and the "owns only an Xbox" crowd. Anyone playing Tony 3 or anyone with the DC version of Tony 2 needn't bother.

Like the rest of the series, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2x is a freestyle skateboarding game that revolves around various level goals. Each stage of the game has a collection of goals, some of which are score based, while other objectives challenge you to smash a set number of objects in a level, perform a certain trick with a certain object in the level (kickflipping from roof to roof, for instance), and so on. Each goal has a dollar amount attached to it. Completing goals earns cash that can be used to increase your skater's stats or customize his arsenal of tricks. Reaching dollar plateaus unlocks the next level, and so it goes. Some levels are competition oriented--here, you'll simply try to impress the judges with a clean one-minute run rather than collect items or break things. The game starts you out with the full Tony Hawk 2 career. Once that is completed, a short 2x career mode, made up of entirely new levels, is unlocked. Winning a medal in the Tony 2x competition level opens up the Tony Hawk 1 career mode. While the Tony 2 and Tony 1 levels are, for the most part, well designed, balanced, and free of problems, the 2x levels, which are new and exclusive to this version of the game, don't hold up nearly as well. There are some nice textures and lighting effects used in the exclusive areas, but the design is quite dull when compared with the standard set by the real levels. The game also has a few small bugs. Occasionally, bailing into the fence in the Philly level from Tony 2 will cause you to warp through it, allowing you to reach the skate park without knocking down the fence first. It's also pretty easy to get stuck between a wall and some scaffolding in the new construction yard level, but you can escape that with no problem. These few gripes aside, however, the game plays just like Tony 2 with the addition of a grind balance meter similar to the one introduced in Tony Hawk 3. The meter helps you stay on your board during long grinds and definitely makes grinding significantly easier.

Aside from the main career mode, there's free-skate and single-session modes, which let you take the levels at your own pace, away from the goal-oriented career. A create-a-skater mode lets you customize your own skater from head to toe, and unlike in Tony Hawk 2 (though just like in Tony Hawk 3), you can create female skaters here. The multiplayer section of the game allows for up to four players to play on one Xbox and eight players to play on two units that have been linked together, though more populated games will be limited to free-skate and trick-attack competitions. The other games include Horse, in which you do a trick, and if the next player can't beat your score, he gets a letter; graffiti, in which doing tricks on unclaimed items in a level turns them into your color, and another player can steal items from you only by doing a better trick on your claimed items; and the self-explanitory tag.