Being the seventh Tony Hawk game developed by Nerversoft, you can’t help but wonder what they can bring to the series to keep it fresh. So what does American Wasteland has to offer? Read on.
Unlike previous titles, American Wasteland doesn’t let you create your own skater. Instead you must pick from one of the five available characters, but don’t let it disappoint you! Later you get to spend some money on haircuts, clothing, shoes, tattoos and accessories (like backpacks and sunglasses), allowing you to make your skater just the way you want it. Or close enough to it anyway, since there’s no sex change clinic in the game!
Also unlike previous titles, you don’t start with all the cool moves and tricks right away. You start out with only the basic controls and little by little, you will learn and earn new moves by talking to key characters. This makes THAW a friendly start for newcomers to the series.
The game’s storyline is actually pretty cool. You start out as a nobody who gets robbed just as you set foot in L.A. You will then meet Mindy (who becomes a sort of guide throughout the game and something more by the end of it) who gives you some hints as who to hang out with, who to learn from and how to claim your stuff back. As you develop new friendships with the local skaters, you learn about the Skate Ranch and your main mission will be to turn this area into skateboarding heaven.
The Ranch at first looks like a landfill with a few ramps and rails, but as you complete missions and retrieve objects from the different parts of the city, you will notice the park slowly changing. If you stay away from it for a long period of time, you will be surprised with the changes made and basically you get to skate on the things you have retrieved.
If you want to drop your board for a while, you can use a bike or walk around. You even have some cool new tricks that you can do without a board or bike: wall runs, wall flips and charged jumps. You can whack some pedestrians with your board too, although this isn’t GTA, so there’s really no point.
There are some problematic camera angles, and not just the “being stuck in corners” thing. As you do certain outstanding tricks in a mission, the camera zooms out and changes view to give you an artsy angle of what you’re doing. Sure, it looks cool, but it helps screwing up the combo timings.
L.A. is a huge environment, split into three major areas (Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Downtown) plus the Skate Ranch. These areas are connected via loading tunnels where you can still do some tricks, or by bus rides. Although these aren’t exactly loading screens, they’re not full areas either, so if you wanted to know if the “no loading” feature that they’ve been boasting about is true, let’s just say the loading screen has been “cheesed out” as not to look like such. You certainly won’t find yourself in the next zone instantly, but these “transitions” are fitting.
THAW comes equipped with a Classic mode for those nostalgic of the previous games, making it the perfect addition for a gamer’s library. In Classic mode, you have all the customization options for Create-a-Skater, including Eye Toy support in the PS2 version so you can place your real face on your virtual avatar. This mode also lets you bring in a friend into a new co-op mode where, for example, both can work together collecting the SKATE letters.
You can go custom-crazy with the Create-a-Park and Create-a-Trick modes, which should keep you busy for quite a while. Then, of course, there is the added online mode replay value, which is now available for the first time on the Xbox version.
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland mixes the old and the new as if Activision wasn’t sure of what would work for it, but one thing is for sure: it has content that will please both veterans and newcomers to the series.