There’s a moment in Alcatraz that I think is pretty much perfect. Here is the deal. I have two goals I’m aiming for. There’s the secret tape, which I can see, high up, but cannot reach, and there’s a mini mission where I must free a prisoner from the main prison block. To do that, I need to knock over a bunch of wheelie bins to find a set of hidden keys, and then beat it back to the central block to unlock the doors.
That tape is eluding me – or rather the route up to it is eluding me – so I focus on the wheelie bins. WIthout about 50 seconds left on the clock I’ve found four of five bins. The fifth I only find when I have about 30 seconds left. But 30 seconds is a lot in a Tony Hawk game. And luckily, the prison block is right behind me. I free the prisoner – woo! – and the doors are left open. I skate in, up a helix staircase, grind around the upper storeys of the block and then, with five seconds left – why not? – I dive out an open window. But then I catch myself on a wild bend of rebar I was not expecting and I grind along on that until – wham! What’s this? Oh yes, I’ve just collected that secret tape I was after.
This is Tony Hawk in all its brilliance. Lovely moments that leave you feeling dazed, competent and a little bit lucky. Skill and memory, but also all those magnetic connections – the chaining together of separate things through speed and elegance and happy accident.
All of which is to say there’s a lot of chatter around Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4. The missing music. The new levels. The tweaks to the flow of the campaign in Tony Hawk 4 itself. But it still has Alcatraz. It still has that endlessly circling sense of momentum. Ultimately, you’re still safe inside a noughties Hot Topic cyclotron. And it still has those moments where A connects to B and to C and then D-E-F and then S-K-A-T-E and it’s just luminously good.
Actually, I think an awful lot of this is luminously good. If you’re familiar with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, this is a fairly similar deal. It’s still two classic games about skating and tricking around intricate, devious, magical levels. Everything’s been rebuilt for modern consoles with recreated environments and lovely, crunchy, limb-tangling animations. It’s the Tony Hawk games as you knew them, and in a way, it’s the games as you almost remember them looking.
Yes, but. As others have noted, this time around a lot less of the original soundtracks made it through what I can only assume has been a gauntlet of lawyers who are not super into skateboarding culture. Each game appears with well under half its original tracklisting and then a load of new music to fill it out.
My initial take was that this is a sad state of affairs. I was never that much into the Tony Hawk music myself, but I’m human, and if you gave me Burnout Paradise without Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend – it’s a terrible song when Burnout is not involved and a classic that belongs on the Golden Record when it is; the heart wants what it wants – then I’d be miserable.
Reading up on it a bit, though, I’m being won over to the idea that new music discovery is a big part of Tony Hawk and always has been. The first games introduced players to tracks they may not have heard and that they went on to love, and so it kind of makes sense, as this piece from Ed explains, that the team wanted to use the new games to continue that legacy.
Either way, there are other changes that are going to be more controversial but that I’m personally quite keen on. They mainly focus on Tony Hawk 4, so I’m pretty much going to focus on 4 from here on out too.
(Actually, no. First, please be aware that Tony Hawk 3 remains a classic. Foundry is still a perfect introduction, and Suburbia is one of my favourite Tony Hawk levels ever – so thematically rich and nostalgic and melancholic. Suburbia has always felt like the fundamental Tony Hawk level – the one that skaters are moving through when they’re pretending to be in all those zanier levels. And Suburbia has been treated wonderfully here. It’s properly decked out for Halloween, and rushing through that Queen Anne has never felt more illicit. But the whole game is filled with this stuff. Tony Hawk 3 is still a deeply good video game.)
Annnnyway. Tony Hawk 4 ditched the two-minute rush of the previous games, in which you skate into a level with a bunch of available objectives, and you do as many of them as you can before the clock runs down. In Tony Hawk 4 you’d skate into a new level and there would be no timer. Instead, you’d find a bunch of NPCs who would send you off on individual missions. It was Tony Hawk Warcraft! Who wants a quest? People loved it, I think?
Now it’s gone, and the Tony Hawk 4 levels are fitted with the two-minute thing. Some of the objectives have been tweaked in order to match that format, I gather, but these games exist in the vapours of fond memory for me so I can’t be too precise about that stuff. Another reason I can’t be precise, I think, is because I personally love the two-minute mission arrangement so it all just works for me. It’s harder for me to see the joins because I’m personally having a lot of fun.
And it’s weird, really. Jet Set Radio, another skating game, sings when you take out the timer and Tony Hawk, I think, sings when you whack it back in. This is probably because Jet Set Radio is primarily a platform and exploration game in which skating is a cool way of getting around. Tony Hawk is skating all the way down, so it’s about what you can do with a level right here and right now, and it’s about what Plan B looks like when Plan A ended in a face plant.
I also love the fact that with two minutes and a bunch of objectives scattered about, you’re back in the world of that distinctly Tony Hawk experience: the run that actually went a bit better than you thought it would. Here is the deal: you’re still getting your skate-legs in so you’re just going to go for the simplest objective – there’s always one or two. In Alcatraz, say, that would probably be rushing around and photobombing three different sets of tourists. But on the way to do that, you find three of the five letter of SKATE. Only two more? Interesting. And you’ve been tricking pretty well, so your score’s looking promising. And you have the keys to the prison block largely by accident. And there’s that fog horn thing you’re meant to skate off.
This is Tony Hawk to me: I went in to do one thing, and I ended up doing five, because I’m cool/talented/enormously lucky. Also, I should add that you can go into the mods menu and change the time limit for each level, winding it all the way up to an hour. You just can’t bring back the whole NPC aspect. Personally I am okay with that.
Something else I am more than okay with are the new levels, of which there are three. Two of Tony Hawk 4’s compliment have been dropped, I gather – Carnival and Chicago – but in their place there are three entirely new areas.
I don’t want to spoil the last one besides saying it’s very different and still very Tony Hawk. Also I’m currently hopeless at it. But the first two you unlock, Movie Studio and Waterpark are both great. Movie Studio is a competition level, which means I’m unlikely to play it that much. It feels smallish but also incredibly dense, and it’s filled with lovely film production paraphernalia. There are monster tentacles, one of those big LED screens people film in front of and a particularly likeable set of dolly tracks, one of which is a closed loop and therefore perfect for cheesing scores and abusing overtime. I would never, obv.
Waterpark, though? I genuinely think Waterpark is a bit of a masterpiece. A few reasons. Firstly, you start high above the action in the manner of a lot of the best Tony Hawk levels, and then you ride a series of waterslides down into the main space. Secondly, it’s a waterpark, yes, but in the best Tony Hawk style it’s abandoned and generally run down by the time you arrive. Flaking paint. Sparking wires. Plumbing on the way out. Part of Tony Hawk’s soul, I feel, has always belonged to places like Margate, and Waterpark is Margate to the core. (Not a diss: I am a fan of Margate, and find me a gallery with better programming than the Turner Contemporary.)
Thirdly it’s just so imaginative. Spun around the edges of the level are individual slides, all of which have their own gimmicks, and yet there’s a lovely coherency as all these different routes rush you back into the centre. It’s like following the segment lines in an orange slice, and it means that no matter how far you’ve been flung out, you’ll be somewhere else soon. Somewhere cool!
This in turn means more of those magical connections this series is so good at, when one grind rail connects with another and you feel like you’ve side-stepped a mile of geometry. It’s not just generous and chaotic, then: there’s that silver core of intricacy. Waterpark, I am here to tell you, pretty much rules. And it feels like it fits. It feels like it’s written in the same handwriting as the levels it fits alongside.
Beyond all this there’s multiplayer, endgame fun, park-building options and all manner of unlocks. It’s generous stuff and I imagine I’ll be playing it on and off for roughly the rest of my life. So! It’s a strange collection in some ways, certainly in terms of following on from the clarity of approach in 1 + 2. There are odd omissions and odd choices throughout. But there are also new additions and choices that, for me at least, make a lot of sense. Remaster? Reworking? Something more complex? This one’s happy to kick-flip between the three options.
Code for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 was provided for this review by Activision.
