Tony Hawk's Underground

The Good
Simple controls make the game easy to learn, but hard to master.

Levels are designed with skating in mind and thus everything is placed to keep combos going.

Plenty of customization.

The Bad
Missions are very short and don't allow you to stay after getting enough points.

Maps are way too large and the settings aren't very memorable.

Not as crazy and over-the-top as its sequel.

Story is not very interesting or inspired.

The Bottom Line
In Tony Hawk's Underground you take control over a skateboarder from New Jersey. After a celebrity visited the slums, you manage to impress him with your tricks and are advised to pursue a sponsorship. After this initial success, you quickly find yourself in the skateboarding industry, posing for magazine ads and partaking in tournaments.

Each chapter starts with a cut-scene that progresses the story, after which you are dropped in a new map and are free to explore it as much as you like. In order to move the story forward, you will have to perform missions for various non-player characters. For the first Tony Hawk game to have a career mode, I must say that I am very underwhelmed. The sequel to this game was all about the "World Destruction Tour", which was a tournament in which two teams had to travel around the world and score points by creating as much chaos as possible. A generic adventure to become a professional skateboarder feels very lazy and uninspired by comparison.

At least the game still has very tight controls to make up for that. A game about skateboarding has the potential to be an unplayable mess, see also the Skate series, but Tony Hawk kept it nice and simple by categorizing the various moves. You use Circle for grabs, Square for flips, Triangle to grind and X to jump. What kind of grab, flip, grind or jump that you do is then decided by what directions you push on the D-pad or control stick. This makes the game very easy to learn once a player familiarizes themselves with the physics, but it also has a lot of depth to it, allowing them to keep getting better and better as they play.

The physics can get a bit wonky, though. Very early on in the game, heck, in the first tutorial objective of the game, it will teach you how to get off your skateboard. This will allow you to climb more effectively and pull yourself up ledges. You'll however quickly notice that the game doesn't care whether you are on a board or not, so walking around feels like your gliding around at high speeds. I can't even confirm that it helps with the climbing; you easily jump a meter into the sky, that much is true, but whether or not you'll grab a ledge or not is a gamble.

Objectives in the game are somewhat varied, but most of them are either about getting a set amount of points, finding items on the map or doing specific tricks. They are all very much alright, but I don't like having to look for NPCs on the maps, since the maps are quite large and the models relatively small. I definitely prefer the sequel's approach; just give me a list with objectives and a picture of where I have to be. There is also something wrong with the pacing, since you only need to do two or three objectives before the game moves on to the next chapter.

This has the added effect that none of the maps are particularly memorable. They're are very nicely designed; most scenery is positioned in a way that allows you to string together beautiful combos and there is enough variation, but the size, combined with how little time you get to spend in them, makes none really stand out. I can still perfectly detail the entire layout of Boston, Australia, Berlin, Barcelona and the final level from the sequel, but wouldn't even be able to name any locations from this game by name.

I am also not really a fan of how the skate-culture (skalture?) is presented in this game. In Thug 2 you were doing the same thing as in this game, but the over-the-top destructive theme made it into more of a parody. In this game you are just being an asshole all day long, knocking down plants and skating on graves to boost your fucking ego. The kick-ass soundtrack is still present, though, which is a relief.

At the end of the day, I'd say that most of my problems with this game come from it being geared too much towards skaters, which I suppose I can't really blame anyone for. The story about a complete unknown working himself up to stardom is probably a lot more interesting if you yourself spend your days grinding away in the local park. The glorification of obnoxious behavior and the control scheme that is easy to understand for those unfamiliar with games further support this hypothesis. The game can still be very entertaining for those outside of the skating scene, but personally I'd recommend Tony Hawk's Underground 2 for those people.