Welcome to the best of the series.... Welcome to a skating innovation for years to come... Welcome to the world of Tony
What can I say? You're a skater, with inhumanely high air and impossibly long grinds and manuals. Your mission is to skate any obstacle that comes along and help your team (which changes... a lot...) win the first ever World Destruction Tour. The story mode takes some aspects of THPS 4 as you can skate around without a time limit, and giving you the choice to accomplish any goals wherever, whenever. With four skaters accessible in every level, this game keeps you busy for a while. Especially if you want to get 100%. The secret skaters you can get, like Shrek, phil margera and Mario, makes it worth it.
There are three difficulties - Easy, Normal, and Sick, so this game offers something for anyone of any level of skill. On Classic Mode, you only get normal and sick, but normal could take the role of Easy Mode as well.
Classic Mode is the usual - 2 minutes long, do as much goals as you can, and when the run is over, retry again, and again. Secret tapes, stat points scattered all over... what more can you ask for? The levels are pretty cool as well. They take many from the classic games, like Downhill Jam, Training and School from THPS1, Los Angeles from THPS2, Canada from THPS3, and much more. All with more detail and many more places to explore on or off you board.
The game introduces new stunts and tricks like never seen before. Focus mode, that when you've played Multiplayer for enough time, where focus is disabled, you don't need it anymore, as it's more of a hazard than a helper. But it's good for novice players to get a feel and rack high points and stuff.
Acid drops help you in many places when you can't spine transfer. Sticker slaps greatly aid you in getting your combos doubled to reach scores more than 10 mil. Vert wallplants are at least there, though not used very often.
Then there's multiplayer. What's more than playing this game by yourself is the ability to play with up to 8 people. Sure, it gets irritating when you're booted from a game for no reason whatsoever, and when you host a game and nobody joins, or when a game you've joined never plays any game... but once it's all boiled down to playing, it is indeed very enjoyable.
GRAPHICS-
I recently replayed THPS 4 and only then realized how great the leap in graphics actually was. I believe they've done an outstanding job enhancing all the old school levels and also how they've formulated the newer ones. Not so much detail that you're overwhelmed, but just enough not to become bored of the surroundings. The blood is also presented very well. You can actually feel the skater's pain when he falls head first onto a statue after trying a 900.
SOUND-
Great music choice on the playlist, and the playlist function helps you decide what you want, when you want it. Personally I only like a few songs... living end, jimmy eats world, disturbed... but the others are nice to skate along with.
VALUE- Definitely Worth playing, even if you're not a great fan of the series. Boredom buster, and overall skill tester, THUG 2 is one of those games worth keeping in your collection.