Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Preview
Tony Hawk’s 1+2 is easily one of the best remakes I’ve ever played. It successfully balanced modern features with an overload of nostalgia for old skate punks with bad knees and a love of Goldfinger.
I’m still pleasantly surprised to see a follow-up on the horizon. Tony Hawks 3+4, though not quite as lauded as their predecessors, is still more Hawk on modern consoles, and that can’t be a bad thing.
During the brief Foundry demo, I was treated to a quick jaunt around the foundry and college levels from Tony Hawk 3+4, respectively, with the birdman himself.
The first thing that struck me was how gorgeous and fluid this latest foray back into the wacky world of eXtreme sports is. The sparks from the forge in Foundry, the bright, sun-soaked campus of College. Pro Skater has never looked better, and rocketing along with a nice solid 60fps (or 120 if your TV can handle it) just makes the score-chasing arcade skating action more engaging and immediate.
At its core, Tony Hawks has always been the very definition of easy to pick up, difficult to master. Quickly pulling off a kick flip or grinding a rail is a couple of button presses away. However, successfully stringing tricks together is a much trickier feat, with an incredibly satisfying sense of risk vs reward based on how much you want to push your combos before you’re inevitably dashed on the concrete.
Each run takes two minutes, and it’s very hard to say no to just one more go. Even after all this time, it’s still hard to pull yourself away.
That’s not to say I don’t have some concerns about the remake going forward. For a start, Reverts, originally added in THPS3, that let you extend combos easier when coming off a vertical ramp, were already included in 1+2, which makes the demo at least feel more like a big DLC pack, for the previous remaster, than a solid new entry. (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing).
Likewise, THPS4’s superb career mode hasn’t been mentioned thus far and seems to be missing in action. I hope this isn’t the case in the full release, as it was one of the best parts of the original, and laid the foundations for THUG.
Finally, there’s the soundtrack. To say the music from the Tony Hawks game had a massive effect on a whole generation of punks and metalheads would be an understatement. There are cover bands that only play songs from Pro Skater 1-4. Rolling around to CKY and Motorhead is the kind of simple bottled nostalgia that warms the cockles of aging game critics.
I don’t want to have to use a Spotify playlist to get the full THPS3+4 experience when it should have been there right out of the box.
These minor concerns aside, though, I am still aching for one more try to hit that massive combo when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 drops on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and Switch on 11th July.
Related Posts
DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH PS5 Review →
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Legends of the Zone Trilogy – Enhanced Edition (PS5) →
Soulstone Survivors Review (PS5) →
