Tony Hawk's Underground

Tony Hawk’s Underground is an incredibly entertaining video game. The skating mechanics themselves are great - the tricks are fun and flashy, the combos are perfect, and basically everything you could want is there. The settings of your skating get increasingly more ludicrous but also increasingly less cool, unfortunately. New Jersey is my favorite location of the game; the rainy, depressing shithole with crack dealers at the end of the street appeals to me for some reason. The story is really, really good for a skateboarding video game. Watching Eric get decked at the end is the most satisfying thing I have seen in any video game, ever. I love everything about this game…except one thing - the maps are too small.

Especially in New York. Skating around the Big Apple should feel a little more free reign; the locations are very limited and it feels like you’re stuck in a box with cool buildings and funny missions laying around it.

Overall, gold standard game for the genre. Soundtrack is great too.

The Tony Hawk series is one that perfected its formula so quickly, that the only way to justify new entries was to fill them up with gimmicky nonsense. This was clear from Underground onwards, building up to the eventually death of the series. Sentenced to the Final Fatal Gimmick: REAL skateboard. But before then, these new gimmicks added some welcomed novelty to the series. While it's difficult for me to pick between Underground 1 and 2 for the sake of this list, I went with the first one, mostly because I like the levels more.

So about those gimmicks! Underground 1 introduced the new concept of getting off the board and WALKING, which includes climbing up ladders and hanging onto ledges. As simple as this feature is, it adds a whole dimension to level exploration and combo possibilities. The most useful implementation is how walking factors into combos, giving the player some extra breathing space to maneuver around. Several missions take advantage of this, giving the players objectives that involve having to climb ladders and jump across ledges to scale buildings. While these missions might be some of the less fluid ones, their variety adds some extra silliness to the experience.

Not every addition is a necessary part of THUG's skeleton. For those looking for all the extra wackiness the game provides, a new Create-a-trick mode has been added. It is surprisingly detailed, including ways to use specific parts of trick animations, and ways to stretch out and speed up other animations. THUG also infamously features drivable vehicles on each level, though typically only one of them, and they all drive about the same as each other. In New Jersey, you can drive a tuner. In Moscow, you can drive an old boxy Russian car. You can do basically nothing useful with these cars aside from playing their original mission (which is not that fun to begin with). Even if you want to drive from one side of the map to the other, exiting the vehicle is going to spit you back to its original starting location, meaning you can't use these cars for their original purpose... transportation. And why would you, anyways? Why drive from one point of the map to the other when you can SKATE there and bust a SICK combo on the way?

With a new game comes new content of the expected Tony Hawk variety. The character customization has returned from THPS4, meaning you can change basically everything and slide it all around on an RGB slider until your character looks like it just fell out of a Skittles factory. Besides this, you have a huge selection of NPCs to unlock and choose from, just in case the gardener from Vancouver caught your eye and you wanted to bust some SICK tricks with him. Of course, there are more tricks to choose from, as well.

The real lasting appeal of this game, aside from the tight physics engine, comes from the beautiful level design. Right away, New Jersey is a multi-leveled series of flowing wires, ramps, and buildings. Not only that, but the level is broken down into two different halves, which gets revealed after a handful of missions during the story mode. Crossing the bridge reveals a railway station with plenty of extra bits to explore. Most of these levels are impressively large compared to the earlier games, vertically as well as in every other dimension. These levels are not big and empty, however, as they're all filled with objects to bounce off of and string together. So much so, that it's harder to find a spot where you can't immediately start grinding on a rail or ledge, or start doing tricks off of a ramp. Some previous Tony Hawk levels are brought back as well, including one of my favorite THPS1 maps, Downhill Jam.

And speaking of story mode, how about that story?? This was the big draw of Underground, that it had an actual STORY. It's not as if any Tony Hawk fan was dying for character interaction and a dramatic plot, but Underground has given it to us, more or less. And for what it's worth, people still remember Eric Sparrow as one of the biggest assholes in all of videogames, so I'd say Neversoft did about as good as they possibly could have. Your original character is constantly dealing with Eric's antics throughout the game, as he is always throwing a wrench in your progress towards becoming a pro. You get backstabbed over and over, and no matter how much further you prove yourself, he still finds some way to get past you. You get to skate around with Tony Hawk and various other real life skaters, though everything outside of the Eric storyline is the same nonsense you'd get from the missions in THPS4. Not that there's any problem with that, but it's interesting to see Underground try to take itself seriously in between silly side missions.

Also the soundtrack in this game is insane. There are over 70 songs, which is comparable to the DDR games on the PS2. They range from the usual punk, metal, and rock selection, but now with a large addition of hip hop tracks as well. This features critical favorites like Cannibal Ox, Nas, and MF DOOM (featured on the Herbaliser track), as well as many obscure gems. I love most of the songs in this game and they add an extra layer of memorability to the experience. It's the strongest point of the game, after all. Tony Hawk's Underground was designed to be burned into your memory, and you won't regret having it there.

A game i still play nearly every day, the gameplay loop of pulling off sick combos, doing advanced maneuvers from those classic improv videos in the 2000s, is all so rewarding. This is a simple game to pick up and play, but one that takes serious dedication to master, when you begin to think you're good getting 10m+ scores then you realise there's a whole new way to play this game with the various tech that opens new doors to improvising your runs, Buttslaps were first discovered in this game, BHRAs were discovered, THUG1 boostplants, wallplant shuffling. So much awesome tech that opened new ways to play TH. Whether it be point scoring or improv, there's many ways to play this game.

The side content also is ridiculously fun and charming, this is one of the few games i can name where you can make your own missions, with their own narratives, ped names and goal types. The park editor is nothing special but you can unlock hours of fun when crafting something masterful. The online was a lot of fun and still is, it can be played via ps2online.com DNS on the PS2, or on the PC version with the Clownjob'd mod.

The storyline is pretty dramatic and saccharine, telling the tale of two nobody skaters turned superstars, with a betrayal twist. Fuck Eric Sparrow. The story is okay, the missions are a little far fetched and silly, like what does using a Leaf Blower have to do with skateboarding? So much unneccesary padding and i think the Story is the weak point for this game, and that's not saying much since it's the best Story this franchise ever had. But playing Tony Hawk for the plot is like watching porn for the plot, you just don't.

10/10

what the title says

I absolutely cannot explain or justify this, but Eric Sparrow honestly ranks as one of the most memorable antagonists in gaming for me. Recommending a skateboarding game based on its storyline feels unhinged, but man, I honestly got really sucked into the plot here. The introduction of the wallplant and the hip transfer made things feel more fluid, I enjoyed being able to get off the board and walk for the first time, and it offered up one of my very favourite THPS levels in the shape of Moscow (and also included two of the only ones I'd have ahead of it, School II and Venice from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, as unlockables), but really, it's the story, and just how deeply I bought in to the rivalry with Sparrow, that I remember this game most fondly for.

Underground has some of the better levels of the open-world era, its best moments losing nothing of the comboing thrill of the series, and with one of the most robust create-a-skater inclusions feeding towards a surprisingly decent, if suitably stupid, story with one of the most cartoonishly evil rivals this side of Dick Dastardly. But this is also where they really started to run out of ideas, as piss-poor driving and stealth mechanics are forced in for a sense of variety, every gimmicky mission just a distraction from the core of the franchise. The Jackass entry was just around the corner.