Tony Hawk's Proving Ground Reviews

..by far. and i've played through all of them. also, in contrast to the many gamers who got bored by the series, i've enjoyed every part a lot - up until this one.

i don't know what the people at neversoft were smoking while they were designing this game. it's like they thought "hey, we'll just throw away all the great basic functionality that made our games great and replace them with crappy stuff that makes for horrible gameplay".

take for example the camera... why don't they just glue it to the ground? the fact that it's not centered behind and - more importantly - above the player any more makes finding e.g. markers on the ground and hitting targets precisely much more difficult than it used to be.

then there's the new balancing scale - what's that all about? that damn thing is all over the screen. i guess the old one was too subtle and easy to handle.

they also figured "ah... who needs a special meter... we had that since... [ can't remember any more - i'm guessing part 2] but who cares about that anyway?" and for taking this one feature out they've thrown in like ten new ones about which i don't really care for.

and just on a side-note - the overall design of the city is incredibly boring.

and on another side-note - keeping all those huge changes in mind, what do you think about the fact that neversoft says that with the tony hawk game they will release this year, they want to do something completely new, in order to keep up with the competition (skate)? what was THPG then? that thing featured more changes than ever before and it turned out to be crap - so what will a game be like when the developers actually set their mind on creating something completely different? but well... back to this game.

what i have to give it credit for is the huge amount of goals and the great-as-always soundtrack. but that's it. if i wouldn't be so addicted to tony hawk games, i probably wouldn't have played it longer than an hour or so.

so if you're a fan of the series like i am, you might still enjoy it, even though you might feel like a masochist at the same time - to other people i'd strongly recommend playing just ANY older part.