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.
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My 25 Favorite Games I Played Before Turning 25, #4
rewrite Feb 17 2024
The Tony Hawk series is a PS1/PS2 era example of arcade game perfection. The evolution from the first Pro Skater until the fourth showed their ability to quickly iron out problems while introducing new mechanics. And by the time you get Tony Hawk’s Underground, it becomes clear that the only path forward involves stuffing this series with gimmicky nonsense. Every entry in the series from here on out would get more and more ambitious with its gimmickry until we hit the inevitable final destination, the point of no return: REAL skateboard. Tony Hawk: Ride. Your controller IS the skateboard. When there’s no room for new novelty, the novelty extends outside of the game itself.
Before the series took a tumble, however, Tony Hawk’s Underground released at a time where the dumb gimmicks were a welcomed addition to the formula. Getting tired of rolling around? Why not get off the skateboard and use your feet? You can walk around, climb up ladders, and hang onto ledges, giving you some extra maneuverability to find new spots across these levels. Several missions put these new movement options to use, giving the player plenty of objectives that involve climbing ladders and shimmying across ledges. While these ‘on foot’ missions feel more janky compared to the usual skating missions, their variety adds some extra silliness to the experience that doesn’t detract much from the game’s progression.
During the player’s story progression, you’re encouraged to come up with tricks of your own by utilizing yet another new feature: the Create-a-Trick mode. This tool is surprisingly comprehensive, letting you screw around with different aspects of the trick animations, with lots to choose from. You can speed up and slow down these animations as much as you want, so if you want your trick to be “10 frontflips in half a second lol”, there’s nothing stopping you from implementing it. Add this onto the extensive character customization options, and customizable skateboard decks, and you have a skating game that truly wants to make this experience all about YOU and your own creativity.
Not every new feature is genius, of course. Perhaps someone in the publishing branch is to blame for the inclusion of drivable cars in every level of the story mode, with multiple ‘driving’ missions scattered throughout the game. Most of these missions are tolerable, but when they get bad, such as the flying blimp in Slam City Jam, or the horrible lawnmower missions in Vancouver, they become a complete nuisance. And if they’re not a nuisance, they’re often boring. The obvious takeaway from these missions is “why the hell would I want to drive around these skateboarding levels when I can just use… my skateboard?”
After all, these levels are designed intricately around combos. Wires, pipes, ledges, ramps, stairs, rails; These are all scattered around every level, always giving the player something to hop onto. This has always been a strong point of the Tony Hawk series from the beginning, and the level design in Underground is some of their strongest work by far. Contrast big, empty open worlds with these compact skating levels. You always have little areas to investigate, hidden secrets to find. They have verticality in addition to their free-roaming openness, layering these levels enough that it will take multiple passes to see everything they have to offer. In addition to the story levels, you’ll find a few returning, polished up versions of old level layouts from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. If you’re seeking even more level content, the game has its own Create-a-Park mode, as well!
Out of all the ambitious additions to Tony Hawk’s Underground, the biggest ‘back of the box’ inclusion is the new story mode. This is no joke, Underground, a skateboarding arcade game, has an actual STORY in it, with voice acting, characters, a plot, and YOU. This is a story that is shockingly effective, as people still remember the game’s twists and turns even today. Eric Sparrow, a character designed to be a backstabbing asshole, still lingers in the memory of anybody who’s played through what boils down to a 10 hour game. Not that you’d need to play Underground purely for the story, but it works well as a motivator to keep progressing through the game, so see how the protagonists’ comeback arc comes into fruition.
Despite the seemingly simple gameplay, Underground is packed with content. Tons of different objectives, and gaps as well, to make sure you explore every nook and cranny of each level. And of course, the soundtrack is insane. Over 70 tracks of premier skater material covering various genres within punk, metal, and hip hop. Tons of obscure gems as well as certified classics lined up here, making the Underground experience more memorable than it was already. This is a game that was designed to burn itself into your memory permanently, and it’s clear that is exactly what it's done for me.
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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
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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.
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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.
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