Several technical issues hold back Project 8's full potential.
The Bad: Not much has changed from the last game, several missing features from the previous game, several technical issues makes the game more of a chore to play
Tony Hawks Project 8 is the 8th consecutive game in the Tony Hawk series. Usually in each game, they try to add one distinct feature to change the formula up a little bit. 8 years running, that plan’s not working so well. In fact, in this game they did that too. However, they also sent a few other features from the previous few games out. Smart move? Not even close.
In Tony Hawks Project 8 you play as once again, a nobody skater who has to earn his way up some kind of ladder to eventually get good enough to do some certain event or something. This time around, your ranked along with 199 other skaters. Your job, get into the top 8 with Tony Hawk. Easier said then done. Basically you’ll work your way doing bizarre missions to please a crowd or two. As you do things like this, you’ll slowly make your way from 200-8. Are you macho enough to get into Tony Hawks Top 8 Skaters?
The gameplay in Project 8 hasn’t changed a whole lot since American Wasteland. But that’s the typical minds of Neversoft and Activision. It’s really a shame, a few changes would’ve done wonders for this one. Anyways you still have your pocketful of miracles. All your insane tricks are there, however some of the innovative ones from last year have been removed. Anyways you’ll start with a tutorial which will walk you through the basics of the game. Manuals, grabs, flip tricks, combo’s, moving, transfers etc. Then you’ll take it from there. You start doing different challenges for everyone. One good thing they actually did was giving you the option of how far you were willing to go. Instead of picking Amateur, Pro or Sick difficulty at the beginning, you got to basically make your mind up as a mission came to you. You got to choose how much harder or easier your mission would be. However, doing easy missions all the time will kill you later. Everytime you finish a mission, your rank will go down a little bit depending on what difficulty you chose. And as you get farther into the game, the amount that the number decreases will become smaller and smaller until only Sick missions will lower your rank. One of the new features that you could say changes it up a bit is the Nail the Trick feature. Basically when your not doing a goal/mission, you can ollie and then click both thumbsticks down. Then everything will go slow motion and the camera will zoom in on your feet. At this point, you have to move the left and right thumbstick to control your feet. Left stick-left foot right stick-right foot. This enables you to do all sorts of crazy flips and spins with your board. While this takes a while to get the hang of, let alone master it, it becomes quite fun to do it. While everything seems pretty great, there are several, frustrating technical issues that will drive you absolutely insane. Say you’ll be in the middle of a Nail The Trick sequence, suddenly the game will freeze up, and the next thing you know your falling on the ground with a huge YOU FAILED screen coming up. Occasionally, you’ll even get a glitch that forbids you to do anything. You can move and skate, but pausing, talking or anything else becomes forbidden. This then forces you to restart your Xbox, hoping to god that you saved from a point that’s not to far away.
Graphically speaking, Project 8 looks fantastic. That’s one of the only things that was done properly. Everything moves fairly fluid. And the other character models look fantastic. Especially when you get into a situation when you get into a sort of cutscene before you do a milestone mission. The person that’s talking to you wont be doing ridiculous arm gestures anymore, they actually look like they’re talking for real which is a pleasant surprise. Also, Project 8 comes with another whopping soundtrack with catchy music that you can easily and anger freely skate too. Plus everything is sounding slightly more lifelike as each game comes. So for this, I thank thee developers of Project 8.
As for will you play this ever again after you beat it? Well the answer is probably yes. Like other games, you can go into free-skate or 2 player matches. However, online play has also been cut from the game, so don’t get your hopes to high. Free-skate lets you basically skate around care free. You can do whatever whenever you want. Cruise around the different areas, set some high combo’s, and have a blast. However, for 2-player, many of the different modes have been cut. You have Trick Attack, Grafitti (which is oddly not in the single player), Horse and Free-skate. It’s a darn shame that so much has been cut from the previous games. Overall, Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is a decent game, however it’s highlights are hard to find when your looking through so many problems. The game will take around 6 hours to get into Project 8, and somewhere between 7 and 8 hours to finish all the goals. Veteran players will breeze through most of the game, but rookie’s might struggle a tiny bit. Although the game is fun, it’s hard to recommend purchasing it at the current price. But anybody who’s a fan of previous Tony Hawk games, or someone looking for a decent game to get out of a monotonous routine, Project 8 is a game you should probably check out.