This game is awesome
User Rating: 9.5 | Tony Hawk's Project 8 X360
The Tony Hawk games have always been good, but lately they have begun to go in the wrong direction. THUG1 introduced a story mode that was a bit poor. THUG2 had a better story, but ended up feeling like Viva La Bam. THAw had a good story, but the gameplay wasn´t as tight as before. It was very easy. Tony Hawk´s Project 8 tries to make the series good again, and it lives up to that. If you wanted Tony Hawk to be good again, then you will be pleased when you find out that the game doesn´t actually have a story. Well ok it does have a story, but it plays a very little part. Tony Hawk is looking for the best skaters, and you (like many other skaters) take up the challange. You start at rank #200, and have to reach rank #1. You gain ranks by completing goals, finding gaps, and secret spots. At first the game is overwelming. You have a compass that shows you where the goals are, and at the start, your compass are filled with goals, as it feels like everytime you take a turn, the compass shows you a goal. There are 200 goals, and most of them have alternate goals. For example, with most goals, you can earn Amateur rank, Pro rank, or Sick rank. For example, one goal requires you to natas spin mailboxes in one combo. You get amateur for 1 mailbox, pro for 2 mailboxes, and sick for 3 mailboxes. This system really proves who is good at the game, and who is not so good at the game. Bailing plays a bigger part now. When you bail, you can control yourself, so you can give yourself as much damage as possible. In the end, you get rated by dollars, so the goal is to get the highst hospital bill as possible. Some goals do use this, to hit spots that gives you points, break gates, break bones, and even bowling. It is quite funny to see yourself get slammed into a tree, or a wall. Classic mode returns this time, but it´s a bit diffirent. Insted of choosing it from the main menu, you can find people who gives you these Classic goals. Back in the days of THPS3, you where really hardcore if you could get all goals in one run. In THP8, there are 10 goals to complete in 2 minutes, but if you want to get sick rank on it, you must complete all 10 goals in 2 minutes, which is quite a challange. A little tip: It´s about finding a route to follow. Go on YouTube to see walkthroughs. You´ll need it!! While you skate, you earn strokes, which is money, and can be used to buy new tricks, and decks. You earn them by doing tricks in front of pedestrians. The biggist improvement is the new Nail The Trick mode. You enter it by pressing down the left & right analong stick. The camera then zooms onto your feet. You now control your feet. The left stick is your left foot, and the right stick is your right foot. Now you just have to make the right combos. But be carefull, one wrong move and your finished. Nail The Trick, and be used whenever you want to use it, so it´s another helpfull way to build up big combos. THAW had you skating in L.A. where there was no loading times, but you still ended up skating through long corridors, while the game was loading. THP8 has no load times, but this time it lives up to it´s promise. There are no lodaing times, so you´ll never be interrputed while skating. The thing that makes skating this good in THP8, is that it isen´t the unrelastic skating found in THUG1&2 and THAW, where you can get so much speed, that you can´t get in the real life. This is back to basics, and it´s all about making big combos. The game also has support for 8 players online, which is as in any Tony Hawk game, quite good. You got the old options, plus one new mode, called Walls. Here players leave a wall when they skate, and if one player skates into your wall, he loses. Besides that, there´s nothing new to report. So far i have talked positive about the game, but the game does have it´s flaws. First of all the difficulty. The difficulty is high, which is good considering THAW´s difficulty, but sometimes, it´s too hard. If you aren´t a Tony Hawk veteran, it´s vurtualy impossible to get sick in all the goals. The new bail goals are very hard too. There is one goal, where you have to break 15 bones, and get a bill on 90000 dollars, but this is mighty hard, cause it´s random how big your bill is. You can hit the same spot, the same way twice with diffirent results each time, and that´s annoying as hell. Serouisly, this game is one of the hardest game ever. It had to buy a new controller, cause i broke my old controller in frustration, adn that´s not a plus. Before, you could create your own trick, goals, levels, skaters, and tag, but this time you can only create your own skater, and even there, the options are limited. It just dosen´t have the same depth as before. You can change some areas in the game, but you don´t have a lot of choices, and it´s farily rubbish. The trick list has also been cut down big time. There are many tricks that are missing this time, which is a bit dissapointing. The graphics are really good, with very relastic animations, and backgrounds. The only flaw is that some of the pro skaters faces look a bit off. There´s really a lot of detail in the enviorments, and the frame-rate rarely drops. The sound is still good. The good old sound effects are back, and there´s a good soundtrack, with Kasibian, and so on. The game does last quite a while. It took me nearly 50 hours to reach rank 1, and duing those 50 hours, i have cryed, and got pissed off, but that only makes it that more rewarding when you finally reach rank #1. It also takes a lot of time getting all the 287 gaps, plus 36 secert spots, and 49 achivements, so there is a lot to do. Overall, THP8 is a very good game. It brings back almost everything good from the previous Tony Hawk games. But the game lacks big time, when it comes to create stuff, plus the game is very very hard. It´s one of the hardst games ever. Now i wrote that it´s very hard to get 100% in the game, but i only need 1 achivement now, and that´s get all the gaps. If you love Tony Hawk, you must buy this. 
