Tony Hawk's Underground Preview

By Ryan Davis, GameSpotPosted Sep 22, 2003 5:52 pm PT

Neversoft's latest skateboarding game takes the focus off the pro skaters and puts you in the starring role. We take a look.

Though the games have always been grounded in reality, the underlying appeal of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games has always been the fantasy of being a professional skateboarder and tearing up skate spots with extraordinary skill. Neversoft, the developer of the series, has tweaked the formula slightly in each game, but none have changed the structure of the game as significantly as Tony Hawk's Underground will.

The Tony Hawk series returns.

One of the most immediately noticeable differences between T.H.U.G. and its predecessors is the structure of the career mode. Instead of stepping into the shoes of Tony Hawk, Bob Burnquist, Bam Margera, or one of the dozen or so different pro skaters from the Tony Hawk games, you'll play as an anonymous skater from New Jersey with aspirations of going pro. The portion of the story mode we had access to took us from the run-down streets of Jersey--where you first get noticed by Chad Muska during a skate demo--to New York City to shoot a skate shop sponsorship demo tape. Then you head down to Tampa for an amateur competition. Multiple runs through this portion of the story mode seem to suggest that the story is fairly linear, but there may be some minor branching later on. Though the focus of the story will be on a no-name skater, all the pros will make significant cameos throughout, sometimes helping you master a new trick and occasionally using their clout to help you advance your career.

How your skater will appear in the game and in cutscenes is entirely up to you and T.H.U.G.'s create-a-skater feature. The past few Tony Hawk games have really beefed up how much control you have over your custom skaters, and T.H.U.G. will take that even further. You can still alter your skater's hairstyle, hair color, basic facial structure, and skin tone. You can also dress your skater in a variety of clothes and accessories and can choose overall height and build. Additionally, you can tweak the size and shape of your skater's head, nose, jaw, chest, waist, biceps, forearms, hands, thighs, calves, and feet. You also have the option of choosing the gender of your skater, which not only alters the wardrobe available to you but changes the voice acting for your skater in the story mode. Though, from what we've seen, the story mode is definitely built with a male character in mind, as much of the dialog is peppered with "man," "dude," and "bro."

Once you get past the exposition, the actual gameplay structure in T.H.U.G. doesn't seem radically different from what we saw in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. You're initially dropped into a level with unlimited time to skate around and just goof off. As you explore the area, you'll run into pedestrians with special markers over their heads. Approach them, and you'll trigger a mission. The mission objectives we encountered included item collection, point competitions, trick competitions, and most surprisingly, a stealth mission. Though we did notice hidden tapes in each of the levels, the S-K-A-T-E challenges, which have been a staple of the Tony Hawk games, were curiously absent from the early single-player game. You'll apparently be able to create and edit your own challenges in other modes, including the collection of these five infamous letters.

Like the Grand Theft Auto series, T.H.U.G will actually have missions that require you to drive a car. The four car-based missions we encountered seemed pretty straightforward, though they definitely show potential and could turn out to be something really interesting and unique.

Your custom skater can learn new tricks. Lots of new tricks.

Each Tony Hawk game has handled you character's gradual improvement in various skating abilities, like rail balance, manuals, speed, and air time, in a slightly unique fashion, and T.H.U.G. will also feature a new system. Instead of picking up stat points or buying them with skater bucks, performing different feats will earn you increased stats in a specific area. Air transfer for 20 feet and you'll gain an extra air stat point, thus adding extra altitude to your jumps. Grind a rail for five seconds and you'll gain an extra rail stat point, increasing your balance on the rail. The game controls the pace by limiting how much you can increase your stats based on how far you are in the story mode. Of all the different methods of stat building in the Tony Hawk games, this one seems like the most organic so far.

Another new, organic feature that will be featured in T.H.U.G. will be the dismount. You'll actually be able to hop off your skateboard and run around on foot, which can serve a few different purposes. First, being off your board lets you jump and climb your way to areas that would otherwise be inaccessible. Each of the levels we played featured at least one hidden area that you could get to by jumping off your deck. Secondly, the off-the-board action introduces the new "caveman" trick.

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