While not a difficult game THPS 3 offers a nice wide variety of levels and it features amazing replay value.
The game play portion retains everything the first two delivered but vastly improves it with better manual controls, more grinding moves, and the newly added reverts. Reverts allows you to continue doing your tricks to add up massive tricks to earn big points and with the improvement of manuals it makes it quite easy. While this makes the skating competitions easy, sad but true, its helps with the new score features. There are now 3 goals of scoring you must get in the levels: High, Pro, and Sick. All ranked from easiest to hardest. It features familiar areas for fans like getting secret tapes and collecting the letters to spell S-K-A-T-E. Another nice improvement is with the characters. You have to skate around now looking for tokens to raise your stats and you need to find your decks (the art on the bottom of your board). Each set of decks is unique to its own skater. However the big problem with the game plays itself is how easy it is. Each character only takes about 45 minutes to an hour tops. But thankful skating around each level is fun in its own right and can add more hours of fun trying to see what kind of gaps there are or trying to beat that high score you got. Perhaps the biggest improvement from THPS 2 is the money system, its no longer there, which got a sigh of relief from me.
As for the games graphics they hold up pretty well. But there nothing fancy and nothing jaw dropping. They for the most part look all right but you feel they could have just improved them a tad bit. But the graphics should be easily overlooked.
The sound portion of the game sounds all right but gets repetitive pretty fast. However some tracks get your blood pumping up while skating around the levels. Some artists included are the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alien Ant Farm.
The overall value of the game happens to be the best part. It featured lots of unlockables and lots of cool videos to check out. Like if you beat the game with Tony Hawk a Tony Hawk video becomes available for your viewing pleasure. Each one features the skaters pulling tricks or whatever they felt like showing the world (you). Also there are a lot of bonus characters like Wolverine or Darth Maul (Star Wars) which all come with there own signature special movies. An example of this would be Darth Mauls Force Grab. And the only way to unlock this content is by beating the game with all of the characters. Not to mention something else that adds even more replay value to the game is its custom map editor. You can make your own parks or little towns, which really was a great feature. This feature was also improved since THPS 2. Multiplayer however wasn't all that special and really hadn't improved since THPS 2. But since it’s on Gamecube I never really had people to play with so it didn't bother me that much.
There are issues, as with every game, but they are few in number. Some could cause problems such as loading on some levels takes a few more seconds then it should. Also the frame rate gets messed up a bit in the later levels, which really didn't look too great. And as stated above the game suffers overall from a lack of difficulty.
In the end THPS 3 is a great game any extreme sports fan would love to own and even people only remotely interested in this sports genre of games should see what they've been missing out on as well.