Ever gets boreding
Last year's release of Tony Hawk's American Sk8land was the first true 3D Tony Hawk game on a Nintendo handheld -- Vicarious Visions has been working with the skateboarding property since the days of the Game Boy, but the DS allowed the development team to finally work pretty much all of the Tony Hawk design into a portable product. The game the team created for the DS last year -- a really solid and original title rooted down into the original Neversoft concept -- is the foundation for Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. That same toon-shaded visual style and silky-smooth, speedy 3D engine's at work in this new product, and even though Downhill Jam shares a lot, the two games are completely different products. For Downhill Jam, the designers have constructed a product that's clearly inspired by EA's SSX brand, which, let's be honest, was clearly inspired by the success of the "extreme" Tony Hawk video game franchise.
The core mechanic of Downhill Jam is racing. There are six different locations in the game that players must progress through. Six course of racing action might not sound like a lot, and honestly that was clearly the biggest turn-off to the product. But it's the enormousness of each course, coupled with how the development team staggered its game progression across these six enormous courses that surprised us. The game isn't just about getting to the finish line as fast as you can. It's about getting there in style.
At the start of the game you're faced with the first course: San Francisco. It's a perfect city to really explore the whole concept of Downhill Jam: huge drop-offs, winding roads, tons of rails and cables to grind off of. It's like the city was made for skateboarding, and the level designers work a fantastic, but ultimately fictional downhill course that takes players down from Twin Peaks all the way through downtown ending at the tourist trap in Fisherman's Wharf.