"More time in the development stage would have helped this game a lot."
The main attraction in THAW is the Story Mode. You play as a skater that you create that moves to L.A. so he can skate at some of the world's most famous skating spots. But, as soon as he gets off the bus, he's jacked of all his stuff. Shortly after that you meet Mindy, a skater girl who helps you get your bearings in L.A. She helps you get your stuff back and soon she takes you to the Skate Ranch, which is a chunk of land where Mindy's posse, a ragtag bunch of skaters lead by a legendary runaway skater named Iggy. You join the gang and soon get the idea to thank Iggy for the Ranch by creating the ultimate skating spot. This has you and the gang running about L.A. stealing pieces for the Skate Ranch. You'll get a dinosaur head, a statue, a giant gas station sign, and more. The storyline overall is decent, and much better than what you saw in the THUG games.
While skating throughout a giant recreation of L.A. might sound like an awesome feature, it's not what it's cracked up to be. You start off with just Hollywood to skate in, and you have to "unlock" all of the other areas as you progress through the game. Usually you do that by first getting all of the Skate Ranch pieces in a given area, or something like that. After that there is a mission available that, upon completed, will open up another area to skate in. Even when you get all of the areas, however, it still doesn't feel like one big city. You see, if you want to get from one area to another, you'll have to skate through some sort of long, narrow passageway while the game loads the other area. (For instance, if you want to get to Downtown L.A., you have to travel through a long, narrow subway station). While you are technically still skating, these passageways are really barren and tend to get frame rate problems.
Other additions to the gameplay include the ability to ride a BMX bike. While it is a neat feature, actually riding the bike feels really clunky and there are only a few tricks to do on it. On your board, there are a small handful of new moves, but I found that none of these moves are really useful at all and the only time you really need to use them is in one of the few missions that require you to do them.
Speaking of missions, the missions in this game, well, kind of suck. Almost every single mission in the game requires you to do a certain trick on a certain object, do a certain combo line, do the tricks that someone calls out, or something along those lines. Only a few of the game's missions differ from that formula. Playing through the game, I wondered what had happened to the inventive and fun goals I had seen in previous games.
An interesting note in the Story Mode is that, unlike in previous games, you don’t start the game with all the moves you used in the previous games. Since you come to L.A. as just a casual skater, you don't know how to revert, manual, or anything like that when you start out. Instead, as you go through the game, people will teach you different moves. It adds some realism to the game, but I got kind of annoyed when I was 1/4 of the way through the game and didn't have a special meter yet.
Another problem with the Story Mode is that it's over extremely quickly, and it's incredibly easy. The game holds your hand throughout the entire length of the Story Mode, which isn't a long time.
The Classic Mode of the game brings back the two-minute run timer you saw in the first three Tony Hawk games, as well as bringing back a handful of old levels as well. The mode brings back 5 levels from the older games in the series. There are the Chicago, Downtown, and Mall levels from the first game, and the Santa Cruz and Kyoto levels from THUG 2 Remix on the PSP. There's also one original level in there, called The Ruins. This is a sort of post-apocalyptic version of L.A. Unfortunately, some of the mode's levels, especially the ones from the first game, although they have been remade using THAW's graphics engine, aren't so hot in terms of level design. The Chicago level especially feels really small and cramped compared to what you see in the Story Mode and the THUG 2 Remix levels. The main problem with this mode is, though, is that, like the Story Mode, it is incredibly easy and short. The short part is forgivable since the first three games (The only three with the two-minute run timer) where short as well, but at least those games gave a good challenge (Many complained that the first three were too hard!). In THAW's Classic Mode, people who have had experience with the previous games should be able to breeze through the Classic Mode on the hardest difficulty in about an hour without too much trouble (I did, and I sucked at the first three games.). Even people who haven't played a Tony Hawk game before should be able to get through it pretty easily on the Normal setting.
The multiplayer mode is still as fun as ever and now the Xbox version finally receives online support this time around. Just be warned that if you can't bust out 1 million point combos or things along those lines, you probably won't do so well online. The same set of modes we saw in THUG 2 is here as well, with modes like Combo Mambo, Graffiti, ElimiSkate, and Free Skate all being there. It would have been nice to see some new moves, but you have plenty there as it is.
The same set of Create-A modes that were in THUG 2 are in THAW as well, there are Create-A-Trick, Create-A-Park, and all that. Unfortunately, there aren't any new Create-A modes this time around.
The game's graphics are alright. Some of the textures look muddy and the characters aren't that great, but the graphics get the job done.
The game's sound is decent as well. The game's soundtrack features a ton of licensed songs. You can also customize the soundtrack and turn off the songs you don't like. If you have the Xbox version, the game also has custom soundtrack support. The sound effects are mostly recycled from the previous games, but those effects are pretty good, so it's forgivable. The voice acting is so-so. Some of the voices are alright while some of them are kind of bad and annoying. One thing that bugged me is that what the characters actually say is really bad. (I counted the word "noob" 3 times or so in the game).
The controls are alright, but you can tell the game was made with the PS2 controller in mind, so there were some compromises made for the Xbox version. It's nothing serious, especially if you've been playing the previous Hawk games on the Xbox, but for people new to the series it might feel a little awkward.
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland overall felt rushed to me. The core skating action is still solid, but most everything else in the game just feels like it could have been a lot better. More time in the development stage would have helped this game a lot, but as it is Tony Hawk's American Wasteland simply doesn't live up to the high standards of the series.