Review: TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER 1+2 Is Nearly Perfect
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is officially out from developer Vicarious Visions and publisher Activision. They were kind enough to send me a PC code to review, and I am loving it. It feels like I’m back in middle school, but better at Tony Hawk games. The game is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
This game is a fairly faithful remake of the first two Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. There are some changes and updates like wallplants, improved graphics, a custom skater creator, and online play to name a few. These changes are, overall, very welcome in my book. The graphics are vastly superior to the N64 and PlayStation versions that released at the end of the 90s, and while I wouldn’t say the graphics are groundbreaking, they don’t need to be. The game looks great. Adding things like wallplants is great because it can help extend combos and get higher scores. Etc.
The soundtrack for the game is absolutely banging, too! It has many of the tracks from the original like “Superman” by Goldfinger, but then has added more tracks like “Afraid of Heights” by Billy Talent. It’s all very awesome and just makes you want to skate. Another point in the game’s favor.
The gameplay is just like you remember though. Instead of a story, you just hop into the different levels and have two minutes to complete certain challenges like a certain score, a certain combo score, collecting SKATE, and more. Nothing fancy, just good old skating. There’s also a pretty robust multiplayer setup that supports two players locally (yes, even on PC) or online.
Although the game is almost perfect, I have two complaints. The first complaint might have more to do with Epic Games Store, but it was still annoying. I play THPS with a controller and instead of using the normal conventions of A,B,X,Y, etc., they use numbers to tell you what buttons to press. You eventually start to get used to is, but it’s fairly annoying. The other complaint is the limitations of the custom skater creator. While I was creating my character, there was no option to adjust gender. While this may just be their way to include non-gender binary players (kudos if that’s the case), I got annoyed because unless I wanted the baggiest of clothing, my characters all looked like they had boobs. While I want some of my characters to have boobs, I don’t want all of them to have boobs. If you try to go shirtless, you’ll just be wearing a sports bra instead. I also just don’t understand why I can’t adjust things like height or weight. It’s kind of lackluster to me, especially since they’ve had things like height manipulation in previous games.
THPS 1+2 is an amazing game. In fact, I would say it’s almost perfect. However, due to a disappointing character creator, it falls just short. I would still highly recommend it to anyone I know, especially since it’s only $39.99! What’s been your favorite part of the game?
