Can I kick it? Yes… Apparently I can.
OHHHHH BOY, I am finally excited to play a Tony Hawks game again! After the abysmal Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5, I thought this day would never come! When I heard they were remaking 1 & 2 using some of the engines used in 5 I was filled with absolute dread and genuinely worried they were going to destroy my memories of spamming the warehouse demo of the original games demo, that handily came on a disc with official PlayStation magazine remember demo discs?
This remake is nigh on perfect and the nostalgia goggles are firmly on but this remake does everything right where 5 did everything wrong and, nostalgia aside, it really just is a very good game.
Okay okay – I could literally just spend 700 words here writing about how the game brings back memories for me or how its just really fun but lets be honest, you want to know why don’t you… DON’T YOU?!
Tony Hawks pro-skater is simply a loveletter to fans of the original games and it succeeds in everything it sets out to do, I found myself constantly restarting levels over and over again just to get one more medal to unlock one more level, this game is the epitome of “just one more go” gameplay and once I began to play I couldn’t put the game down again for hours. I picked it up this morning to pop a quick 15 mins on before I went outside to do my daily tasks – only to find out I had been playing it for 3 hours without taking a break!
First thing I did in the game was create this horrific monstrosity that I tried to make look like me – before realising it wasn’t possible and would just annoy me throughout my hours… so instead I just created a bearded dude who I thought looked like a skateboarder and cracked on. One thing I really liked about the character selection screen was that all these skateboarders I semi knew from back in my own skatepark days (I was a rollerblader though, represent!) is that everyone has been aged effectively to where they are now in this hell year of 2020.
What I mean by really like is, I really hate this and it made me feel really bloody old but if these people in their 40s can still “kick it old school” then I myself, a man at the end of my 20s can bloody well do anything!
For the uninitiated – the gameplay is super simple: Circle does grab tricks, triangle does grinds and square does flip tricks. You are tasked with chaining these together on a plethora of different levels to make the sickest combos for ever increasing high scores.
Alongside this are a slew of challenges that the game presents you with ranging from “collect 5 robots” to “heelflip this gap” and the thing I was pleasantly surprised about is that I became so addicted to doing every single one of these challenges and not moving on to the next level until I had done everything each one had to offer me.
There are a few skaters who I have no idea of but the inclusion of more Women skaters in the game is definitely a step in the correct direction for the franchise and when I was watching the videos of each of the skaters, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the talent of all the modern skateboarders – however it was the ones who I knew that I still cared more about.
UNFORTUNATELY the fabled unlockable characters don’t exist in the remake and whilst not being able to unlock Spiderman in this remake is disappointing, the replacing of him with Jack Black made me happy enough that I cannot really drop a point in the end of it all.
There is something so satisfying and addictive to the simple gameplay of Tony Hawks Pro Skater that just hasn’t been matched in decades – until now! It has been so much fun to get my hands on this again and kickflip my way into oblivion that I simply have no faults with it whatsoever – I think this might actually be a perfect game and with that in mind I cannot score this game anything other than a
Am I blinded by nostalgia? Yes. Do I care? Not at all. This is my review and that’s my score!
If you are looking for something to fill the hours and just be nice, simple brain off fun then you need not look any further than Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1 & 2.
If you hate fun then its probably not for you though…