The Hawk formula isn’t what’s at fault here - it’s everything that surrounds it
Unfortunately, that’s right where THUG2 smashes into the pavement - the level design, for lack of a better word, sucks. The skating has never been a problem in Tony Hawk games. Combos are easy to execute but difficult to master. You can do many things to start of a combo - you can do a flip trick, a grab trick, a grind trick, any skateboarding trick. Now, as you land that trick, you have the option to go into what’s called a ‘manual’, where you balance on two of the wheels on the skateboard. Using this trick, you can connect the other tricks that you do - from a manual, you can do another flip trick, grab trick, grind trick, etc. Not only that, but other things similar to a manual help you keep your combo going - for example, walking, where you get off your board and move around on-foot for a limited time without losing your combo score. When you land the combo (on skateboard) you get all the points you managed to earn from that combo. Fall or lose your balance, and it’s all gone.
The goals also aren’t that great an issue - in the main mode of the game, you skate up to bystanders and other skateboarders to receive your goals, and then you (more often than not) get a timer to complete them in. There are some goals that you can do at any time without any timer at all, as well. This works well enough in progressing the game, with the game sometimes throwing curve-ball goals at you with confusing instructions on your first take. It’s hard enough to make the single player mode last long enough for it to be acceptable - it’s still short, but any longer and it would have simply begun to get repetitive and boring (not generally what happens in a Tony Hawk game, but what it so for this case, thanks to the level design which I’ll get to soon). The other single player mode - Arcade (or ‘Classic’) - gives you a two-minute time limit and a bunch of goals to complete in that time. This plays out just like standard Tony Hawk pre-THPS4, but the goals can also be found either as exact replicas or as very similar goals in the main mode of the game, making Arcade feel like somewhat of a waste of time if you played through the main mode first (or make the main mode feel dull if you played Arcade first). Not too great an issue since on your first play-through the goals are fun enough.
But if you’re really to enjoy the game, the levels have to be of good quality - sadly, THUG2’s levels feel thrown together without much thought put into them. Every level has a couple lines where it’s easy to pull off combos - fine enough for the beginners. However, everywhere else in the levels are either wastelands with hardly anything to trick on, or plenty to trick on but with objects placed in such weird places that you can’t really string together good combos on them. It’s a pain to play any of these levels. It doesn’t help with the isometric view - on your first couple plays, the confusing view will have you falling. A lot. It’s too difficult to understand where your character is exactly in the level in some areas when you’re unfamiliar with the level.
The level design is only the first low point, though - sadly, the music is also terrible and the graphics have far too much cartoon flavor. The music here attempts to break from the GBA Tony Hawk mold by adding in music with vocals - that is, what seems to be real MP3s. They have Rock ‘n Roll High School, and some rap music, but the music is edited - as in, they’re maybe 20 seconds long each. With such a short soundtrack (less than 10 songs), these quick clips become annoying rather than enjoyable. I would have much preferred the midi/ringtone music of the past Hawk games, being were more of a pleasure to here and much longer.
The graphics also sink because they’re too cartoon-like. This isn’t cel-shading we’re seeing here (that would be much better), but rather over-exaggerated ‘realistic’ graphics, which look as ridiculous as an anime (Dragonball Z, Inuyasha) character would if portrayed unchanged as a real human figure. It doesn’t even look funny - clearly the developers tried to add character to the game, but succeeded only at making it a pain to look at (literally - it may not bother you too much at first, but the graphics get on your nerves like nothing you’ve experienced before after enough exposure to them).
So while the basic gameplay of THUG2 remains unchanged (and hence still fun), the level design destroys the joy of stringing together combos, the music annoys you to a point where you’ll probably hit the options to turn it off, and the graphics get on your nerves so easily that in the end you’ll simply want to turn the game off. THUG2 was a low point in the series on the consoles, but it was still easily playable. THUG2 for GBA, on the other hand, is only slightly more playable than a PS2 disk in a PS1 system. The Hawk formula isn’t what’s at fault here - it’s everything that surrounds it. Hawk fan or not, this is one to avoid.