I was initially excited for Tony Hawk’s pro Skater 5. Robomodo was making a ton of big but completely achievable promises. Then we got the first videos, then as we got closer to the game’s release date and we got a look at the graphics, physics and levels the disappointment began to set in. It looked like a last gen rehash at best, but I still held out a thin sliver of hope. Maybe it wasn’t going to be the next big thing for the skateboard genre like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or Skate were, but it could still be fun enough that I could eke something out of it.
As I write my review for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 the age old adage comes to mind: “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” It felt as though the best thing I could do was not review the game and tell my friends in hushed whispers ‘don’t buy it.’ But then I recall all the hype or rather, propaganda videos put out on this game, I recall the 60 dollar price tag, I recall withholding advanced copies of the game. It’s not on me to do this game a service since it hasn’t done any in return.
I don’t usually start here when reviewing video games, I don’t know anyone that does, but I want to talk about the opening titles. You know, all those company credits that fly by letting you know who exactly was responsible for the game you were about to play. Cast in the name of God… Ye Not Guilty. As Activision and Robomodo swung at me in the opening scenes I was faced with frame loss and slow down. You read that right. The game couldn’t properly process its own opening title sequence. I would also like to mention the actual game was was just under 5 gigs with a day one update file that was near 8 gigs. What a fantastic sign of things to come.
I select Ishod Weir and try to jump into the first stage “The Berrics”, a real world skating location and one of the few new locations you’ll visit before the many rehashed Tony Hawk levels. Right away the level seems a bit barren with only ‘combo’ and ‘skate’ and my collectible DVD and VHS tapes (wouldn’t that be blu rays in the year 2015?). However I do notice there are markers scattered around the level. Lots and lots of markers. I’m no fool, I know enough to know markers trigger challenges, Skate’s giant open worlds had markers that would transition you to a cutscene or seamlessly into the challenge they wanted you to take up. Robomodo on the other hand decided challenge markers needed to take you through a series of menus and loading screens. Far from the seamless and fun transitions of the other games they aped.
The constant transitions between challenges is in part due to their online structure. Said online structure of this game is utterly asinine. It’s always online even for single player/private skate sessions, with no local multiplayer, because no doubt thousands of people will want to pirate this masterwork. Whenever you complete a mission the game bounces you back to an open lobby regardless of whether you created a private game or not. Finally even when playing in public lobbies there seemed to be so few co-op challenges it was unnecessary for the game to be online in the first place. You could start up parties and play team death matches, but I was hard pressed to find anyone actually willing to participate. I suppose I should at least be thankful the servers were actually able to handle a decent amount of players. Though instead of all this bouncing around the player from one lobby to the next, they could have gone with a far simpler and seamless structure like the one Skate and Metal Gear Solid V use, in which you choose whether you want to throw your world online once or not.
In attempting my first challenge, “destroy the drones”, I can’t begin to describe to you reader how absolutely terrible the game ‘felt.’ It’s like nothing I’ve really experienced in other skateboarding games, and it’s almost like nothing I’ve experienced in gaming period. The board and your skater feel like they have no heft or weight to them. There is very little in the form of feed back, physical, audio or otherwise when you land tricks, manual or revert. It’s initially throwing especially when you’re trying to pull off a combo (or collect COMBO for that matter). I would also often find myself holding down or slamming buttons to get my skater to respond to what I needed her to do. Skating, to me, is about chilling in both video game and real world form. If I’m having a good time and flicking the buttons to get my skater to do neat tricks then great. If I’m wrestling with the freakin’ thing like it’s a piece of Ikea furniture than you’ve failed your most important job.
Pair the controls off with a jittery frame rate, what seems to be a low gravity environment and friction-less surfaces. It’s a good thing the penultimate level of this game is the “Asteroid Belt”, because that’s the only environment I could believe the world of THPS5 exists in. In addition to this several features that appeared in other Pro Skater games are flat out gone, such as the ability to get off your board (didn’t so much miss it) and the ability to trick into other types of manuals (missed it a lot), in fact with challenges that restrict you from using manuals I think Robomodo may actually believe manual tricks are the devil. It’s not so much Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 as it is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.5… and that’s generous.
Controller mapping is equally awkward. Such as fakie setups being tied to your “Special” activation button. The most stand out of these things is the ability to slam down your board and hard land a trick. Now, this was something also featured in OlliOlli and Skate, and it’s really the game’s only claim to ‘originality’ and a ‘new’ feature. The difference is in Pro Skater 5 your slam button is mapped to the same button as your Grind, so it’s entirely possible and quite common that you’ll try and utilize a grind to extend a combo and you instead end up slamming your board to end the combo early. Other games you’ll find this feature in will have the slam/landing button mapped to X, which not only makes more sense for the orientation (hard down in correlation to the button at the bottom of the controller) but it also prevents mistakes like ending your combo.
The challenges themselves didn’t look anything like Tony Hawk, more like a burnt husk of Tony Hawk. Nonsensical challenges where I might have to pop over-sized sports balls in a pool or destroy drones in a skate park with no other rhyme, reason or thematic ties other than “the game said so.” No challenge was too fantastically fun, there were weird score challenges for grinding or vert where none of your tricks actually mattered all that much, but the more important thing was just to grind or stay in the air. This kind of barely thought out game design lead to several challenges where it was easier to just cheat or ignore the rules than it was to complete the challenge. Shooting bulls-eye targets comes to mind, rather than fire a stupid projectile from my board that would likely miss I could just grind/skate into everything and clear the challenge in record time.
So let’s talk custom options. I think Robomodo “mislead” a bit when talking about customizing your skater, embellished if you will, a bit of “propaganda” sprinkled in with the accuracy of their claims. They didn’t flat out lie and say we would get create-a-skater because lying is bad, but why not bend the truth a bit? So there are two ways to customize the “look” of your skater and one incredibly restrictive way of selecting your tricks. You get to select from one of several pros from Tony Hawk, to Tony Hawk Jr., to Leticia Bufoni, Nyjah Hudson and Lizzie Armanto. Robomodo made a big deal about including female and minority pros and you know, I appreciate that, these are some of the skaters I follow closely, I find Hudson and Armanto to be real exciting in the real world of skating.
What I don’t applaud and instead give my waggling finger of shame is how damn restrictive the game’s customization is. Tricks are statically tied to a pro, and each pro comes with two outfit changes (save for the Hawkman who comes with a whole three, four if you pre-ordered, oh gee thanks for your generosity). You can also choose to switch that pro over to a complete “Custom” mode in which you select ‘cards’ to mix and match different pre-made heads, bodies and decks. This is the closest thing to Create-a-Skater, which I only found out after I accidentally turned the Brazilian female Leticia into a transitioning black man.
My bad Leticia.
You can either unlock these customization cards as you play or purchase them with cash you earn in game. Here’s the problem with the latter, the game doesn’t show you what you’re purchasing, instead you get a black silhouette and have to “guess” as to what you’re getting yourself into. It might be one of the most absurd things I’ve ever seen. Why should something I’m purchasing, digital dollars or otherwise, be some sort of “mystery box” prize? I really have to scratch my head and question how the design process at Robomodo went down. If they actually planned these things out (which is a scary thought) or if they snorted a ton of Red Bull, made some slap dash decisions and then sugar crashed into nap-time at their cubicles.
Your job here is to “guess” what you’re buying. I “guess” I’m buying a cowgirl. I “guess” this was a dumb design choice.
Beware who you choose as your first skater because it feels like you’re stuck with them for life. A shotgun wedding in video game form. I didn’t necessarily want to play my entire game as Leticia Bufoni, don’t get me wrong, she seems like a cool enough cat in real life, but I was just kind of screwing around with my options in game. What’s so limiting are the stat spreads. As in: Pros get shit for stats and it’s entirely up to you to unlock said stats which will then be exclusively assigned to that Pro. That’s not necessarily “new” but building stats from the ground up used to be reserved only for your custom skater, while Pros often had pre-assigned stats. Stats aren’t exactly thrown at you either. You have to earn and assign them from 0/128. Multiply this by 10 skaters (excluding hidden or locked characters) and it means you’re trying to gain 1,280 stat points. I’d say that places a little pressure on you to stick with what you’ve got. Your best option is to try out the different Pros, see whose skill set you like the most, and tough it out the rest of the game with them. Just like choosing your favorite flavor of ice cream and having to eat it the rest of your life, It’s going to stop tasting good pretty damn fast.
Pro videos are present in this game in the form of character bios, so that was a nice touch. I also at least enjoyed the soundtrack, if nothing else I could count on Robomodo to make me a pretty good playlist, though of course I couldn’t be trusted to edit my own playlist. Yep. That option is gone, so you couldn’t say, take Lil’ Wayne off the playlist if you wanted to. Did I mention Lil’ Wayne is also in the game? I mean like, as a hidden character. So there’s that. Real G’s roll in silence like lasagna.
Made something out of Nothing. Thanks for nothing.
Create-a-Park is the only place Robomodo didn’t completely screw up. I found it to be one of the easiest Create-a-Park’s I’ve ever used and it had plenty of options complete with power ups and decorative set pieces. I was able to jump into other player’s parks fairly easily to try them out, albeit with quite a bit of lag and finding it easy for my skater to get “snagged” on objects depending on the geography of the park. I once got caught bouncing endlessly between two rails in a nightmare loop in one player’s park, for example. But aside from a few terrain snags and some lag I found the Create-a-Park to be one of the few functional things in this game.
This game has very little in terms of merits. If you’re starved for a 3D skateboarding game I would in all honesty, 100% suggest you go grab yourself a 5 year old copy of Skate 3 or perhaps dig even further back into the Tony Hawk series for a game Robomodo didn’t poison. As a bonus you’ll also be saving yourself a lot of cash off this game’s gouging $60 price tag. Forget the completely backwards design decisions and incompetence in programming. I mean hell other skating games have had their share of problems. Skate had its weird ragdoll, Neversoft’s Tony Hawks had the occasional physics glitch and OlliOlli has its difficulty, but these other titles and brands all had one think Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 is missing: Fun.
Even something as simple as pushing off on my skateboard, performing a spine transfer or even trying to start a mission could be unresponsive. I’d sometimes struggle to make my skater do as I wanted them to, a far cry from Skate’s ease of use or Neversoft’s magnetic cling to surfaces. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 feels like a chore. At no point did I have any actual fun and the game utterly perplexed me with its choices. The forced online was irrelevant, why give me a world with other players when there is little chance or reason to interact with them? The pros featured in this game deserve better, the fans of the franchise deserve better, and Robomodo does not deserve your money.
