Hey, w8! Don't h8 what's gr8! Bring your DS and come out to sk8!
Tony Hawk games are addictive, and that’s thanks to it’s solid engine. Let’s kick off with the basics. Tony Hawk games are skateboarding games. In these games, you move around the various environments (which range from a Warehouse to a Cruise Ship to Hollywood, throughout the series) pulling of ‘combos’ of tricks. Combos are really what make the Tony Hawk games so fun - it’s like the shooting itself in shooters, it’s what defines the series. The idea is to chain together the tricks you do. Tricks are all worth some amount of points, and there are various types of tricks. Flip tricks, grind tricks, grab tricks, manual tricks, lip tricks and other tricks.
One flip trick may be worth 120 points. Tricks such as flip tricks or grab tricks (where you flip/grab your board, as the name would suggest) can be done on ground and can be done into a ‘manual’. The manual is one of the things that connects these tricks. A manual is the balance on your board in an awkward position (where you could actually lose balance) - generally riding on the front or back wheels of a skateboard only. You do a flip trick, or a grab trick into a manual - then you’ve already started your chain (combo). As you fight to keep balance of your manual (which you do by balancing a balance meter as it’s indicator moves from left to right) you look for where you can continue this combo to score even more points.
You see a rail up ahead, and you can grind it. So you approach the rail and move into a grind trick - essentially a manual on rails - and keep balance as you slide along. Once you hit the end, you’ve racked up more points, and you go into another manual before you touch the ground. Up ahead of you is a quarter pipe, and off that you know you can to a special trick. These clever special tricks can only be done when your special meter is full, and you fill that by successfully pulling of tricks. A special trick can be worth ten times as much as a normal trick, but it usually takes longer to pull off.
So you skate up the quarter pipe and you’ve gotten air - you decide to pull a Fingerflip Airwalk, one of the shorter special tricks. You do it and land on the quarter pipe. As you land, you revert - a move that can be done with the simple tap of a button. The revert spins you around on your skateboard on the ground as you land from something such as a quarter pipe - and gives you a brief moment to ollie (jump) and land into a manual to keep your combo going.
That’s a Tony Hawk game in a nutshell, and if it doesn’t sound appealing to you, then you will not enjoy Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land. Which is rather unfortunate, as not only is THAS the best handheld version of a Tony Hawk game ever thus far (arguably - some may give this honor to the PSP’s Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 Remix), but it also in quite a few ways trumps it’s big brother console game - Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland.
THAS starts you off with a nifty menu similar to that of THAW’s - a chain of options top to bottom with music playing in the background. Not the bloops and bleeps of GBA yesteryear, mind you - real, licensed music. This game has a good selection of different songs - Dead Kennedys, Green Day and Frank Black among others. Some songs have been cut in size - most notably Dead Kennnedy’s California Uber Alles - but it isn’t a horrific ‘short’ cut like THUG2 (GBA)’s was, meaning it’s acceptable and understandable (considering the medium the data’s being put on). A bonus is the option to turn off any song you don’t like and don’t want to hear - which is in the Options menu. The Options menu sits along side the Story mode, the Classic mode, the Free Skate mode, the Wi-Fi mode and the Skateshop mode. Each of these modes are rather deep, definitely more so than the GBA Tony Hawk games of yore.
The first mode on the list, the Story mode, is the main mode of the game. It covers a very short story (regardless the difficulty you pick - and there’s only two difficulty options, unlike in THAW) that’s different from THAW’s. You’re skating at a local skatepark, busting some sick lines (though at this point you’re not actually controlling the game) when Tony Hawk, legendary skateboarder, checks out your skills. He’s wowed by your abilities and asks you to come on the bus with him to Hollywood to shred there. You follow, and upon arrival to Hollywood you meet ‘local skate chick’ as she refers to herself, Mindy. Mindy’s a budding cartoon artists hoping to get her skateboarding comic American Sk8land published, and she decides to tag along with Tony and you. You quickly discover an old warehouse - one where Tony Hawk and other pro skaters apparently grew up skating. However, it’s unfortunately not in the best of condition. So Tony Hawk comes up with a great idea - make cash and re-build it! And that’s basically what you’re doing throughout the entirety of Story mode - collecting cash by doing goals and then buying pieces to add to the warehouse.
When you load up the first level, Hollywood, you’ll be greeted with so many changes to the GBA predecessors that you’ll wonder if the same development company even made this game (and they did, too). The first major change is the camera - no longer is the camera set at an awkward isometric angle as in every GBA Tony Hawk game to date - it’s now set behind you, the skater, so that you can explore this fully 3-D as you would from the view of a platformer -just like on the console Tony Hawk games. That’s right - THAS is fully 3D. It feels and plays just like THAW, save for a few missing features and tricks. However, it doesn’t look like THAW - THAS has a look all of it’s own. It’s cell-shaded - that meaning it basically looks like a cartoon, as in Cel Damage or Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. This cartoon feel doesn’t take anything away from the Tony Hawk series, but does successfully add flavour and personality - something that THUG2 (GBA) tried so desperately to do but miserably failed at. Each character has unique clothing and look, and the environments are coloured with bright, beautiful colors - blues among the buildings and yellows among the streets. It’s enjoyable to skate in this area, and it lacks any of the realism or grit of THAW’s version of Hollywood - which is surprisingly a huge plus.
Skating around in THAS is not slow, as some would think. It feels a lot like a mix between Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and Tony Hawk’s Underground - it isn’t as fast as the recent Tony Hawk games (it’s more at equal speed with THPS3), but it includes many of the features of the new Tony Hawk games. Remaining is the wall slap (where you ‘bounce’ off a wall by pushing your leg into it and projecting yourself off, a trick that’s very handy when it comes to combos), the spine transfers (where you can transfer from one quarter pipe to another, as introduced in THPS4 - this also allows you to level yourself when launching off a vertical ramp so to save you from bailing if you move too far away from the ramp or to level you with a rail above you so you can continue your combo there), the Natas spins (spinning around on a pole, for example) and the rolls (frontflip/backflip/roll tweaks from THUG2, which means you can tweak any air trick you do with one of these to make it also a frontflip/backflip/roll). Gone is the ability to walk (as introduced in THUG) and the ability to ride BMX bikes (a huge addition to THAW). The two missing features don’t kill the game by any means, but the ability to walk has become an integral part of modern combos on the console - it’s lack of appearance on the handheld means that console veterans will have to slightly adjust their combo styles. It should’ve be much of a big deal.
The goals you complete can be anything from trying to rack up as much points as possible in the time limit you have to spray painting your ‘tag’ on various marked spots around the area. These goal are all very easy - any Tony Hawk veteran will breeze through these (and the story mode itself) in just an hour or two if they select the goals from the menu (instead of riding around the city looking for the people to give them the goals, as in THPS4 onwards). The newbies, however, will need to take time to adjust to the mechanics of a Tony Hawk game - which are thankfully easy to grasp, if taken bits at a time. As you rack up the dough by doing these goals, you’ll be able to purchase pieces for the warehouse - you always get three different pieces to choose from, each one different in price. You don’t get to select where to place the pieces, but the ability to select which pieces at least allows for some customization of the warehouse.
As you do the goals you’ll eventually get enough done to take on the ‘main challenge’ of the level as issued by a pro skater - you could basically call them the ‘boss battles’ of this game. The pro’s challenges, however, are often as pathetically easy as any of the other challenges, defeating the whole purpose of giving them to pros to give to you as the final challenge of the level. After you beat that goal, you move on to the next level. THAS takes THAW’s levels and ports most of them into the game card, losing only pieces of each at various points. However, THAS lacks a number of levels from THAW - all of THAW’s Classic mode levels are missing, as is Santa Monica, Casino, the Skate Ranch and the Oil Rig of THAW’s Story mode. Replacing those are both the Warehouse (the same one you build - basically this game’s Skate Ranch) and Alcatraz from THPS4. Alcatraz is shockingly similar to it’s THPS4 counterpart, and is possibly the most identical level of all those in THAS. However, that doesn’t excuse it’s replacement of such levels as Santa Monica or Casino - plus, why choose Alcatraz over such levels as Kona or College, where the Story of THAS would make much better sense? Alcatraz is a good level, but the decision to pick it over other just-as-good levels that would make more sense with the story is puzzling. I shouldn’t complain, but when something like Kona could have been included you have to wonder.
The Story mode won’t last long if you’re a veteran and will remain pathetically easy throughout - even on the pro difficulty setting. And that leads to one of the downfalls of THAS - it’s really too dang short. Classic mode extends the play somewhat, but not enough to make it as long as many other DS titles available currently. Classic mode is, however, probably the funner than the Story mode, if only because it resembles Tony Hawk’s Pro Skaters 1 - 3’s Career modes. In Classic mode, you’re given ten goals and a two minute timer to complete them in. Goals range from collecting all the ‘S-K-A-T-E’ letters to getting a sick score of points. All the levels from the Story mode are here, so nothing from the game is missing. Classic mode is also tougher than the Story mode - on the pro setting, the last level of the game will have you trying for a sick score of two million points and a pro combo of one million. Both these prove that THAS is there for the veterans - it’s just confusing then as to why the pro Classic mode is somewhat difficult whereas the pro Story mode isn’t.
After you complete classic mode, your single player objective seeking is basically over. You can replay Classic mode with other pro skaters in the game and unlock cheat codes for the game this way - but as the cheat codes are just that, cheat codes, there really isn’t much inspiration to go through it over and over unless you want a 100% complete file. But that’s where the Wi-Fi options come in. THAS is one of the DS’ three online games at the moment, and is probably the most robust of the three as well. Online, you can from your own crew (basically a clan) by signing up at the American Sk8land website, and then compete online in-game to be the best crew, or you can just go head to head against other players. Cheating isn’t possible online, thankfully, so everyone’s on the same page. Actual online play require a broadband Internet connection along with a wireless adapter, but if you have that then you’re good to go with the same mode that kept you playing the console Tony Hawk games. By going online you can also download more goals for the game’s levels - and that’s just the first of the promised slew of downloadable extras for the game. THAS hits the online nail in places Mario Kart DS didn’t, and also hits the nail where Mario Kart DS did.
Many of the game’s quirks lies in the Skateshop, however. Here, you can do things such as designing your own board, giving yourself custom sounds and selecting different specials to use. Designing your own board uses the touch screen to allow you to draw a graphic for your board - unlike in the console games where you select pre-made designs and throw them on the board. Selecting different specials this round also allows you to select which combination of buttons that special requires. You can also reprogram the ‘touch specials’ - special moves that appear on the touch screen when you have special in-game that you simply touch to activate, rather than entering a button combination. You can customize the sound you make when you fall and the sound you make when you nail a gap or special move using the DS’ built in microphone. You’re restricted to an extremely short amount of time to make the noise you want - two seconds or less, about - but the sheer coolness of hearing yourself in-game when you fall or land a special more than makes up for it. The Skateshop has lots of little quirks like these that utilize the DS’ full capabilities and offer fun extras to enhance your gameplay experience.
That isn’t to say that this game doesn’t have it’s fair share of faults. THAS is unfortunately quite high in bug/glitch count. Sometimes you can still skate beyond the end of the time limit in Classic mode, if you’re pushing in combos too quickly the game can sometimes be a little bit laggy in response time and the game has frozen itself when playing after cut scenes. There are also ways to exploit the game’s many areas in-level which offer such short grind times that nothing really happens to the balance meter. However, there don’t happen often enough to kill the game, making it still very playable. But, there is one bone-crushing error in the game that is rather terrible - once you complete Classic mode, you get a cheat code. However, if you incidentally choose to restart that round, you miss that cheat. Never to see it again. Ever. Unless you restart your game. And that really, genuinely sucks. But, it's avoidable.
THAS isn’t an amazing new Tony Hawk game that trumps every other game in the series to date. Rather, it’s an extremely respectable interpretation of it’s console counterpart, put on the DS and showing a lot of what the DS is really capable of. The game is solid, fun and it has everything key that a Tony Hawk game needs. It’s easily one of the better titles out on DS right now.