Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD by Herschel Blue​
Remember back in the day when games were all about fun? When you picked up a legendary game called Tony Hawk Pro Skater and you had the time of your life? You didn't worry about trophies, achievements or online leaderboards? Where your biggest competition was your best friend down the block and you did your best to break the high score every time you popped the game in? Yeah those were the times right? Well Tony Hawk HD imitates and fails.
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Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD takes stages from both Pro Skater 1 and 2 and attempts to make a good quality game from it. Ultimately in the game play, the style is geared towards THPS2 given away by the ability to do manuals. The strange thing about THPS HD is the fact that it plays like an old Tony Hawk and it doesn't all at the same time. From what I can tell, the things that needed to be fix were still broken and the things that didn't need to be fixed became broken. To see this as fixing the game is far from accomplished as one of the changes made to the game, the quick recovery, is horribly remade. Originally, when pressing the ollie/crouch button rapidly, the recovery frames of the skater would decrease and the skater gets up faster. Now, it has become a screen transition that places your character at the crash spot in neutral position. Someone failed to check this feature as this sometimes glitches the character into the stage.
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Though, with this said, the game doesn't look bad. If you had played the original THPS 1 or 2, you can tell the huge differences. Even from the remake, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2X, the graphical differences are quite obvious. However, eye candy was never the selling point of Tony Hawk, it was all about playability.
THPS HD, plays like a Tony Hawk and it doesn't. Some things work and some things don't, but there are some cool things about the game that I found very fun. One of the two new playable modes, Hawkman, is not only fun but useful. The purpose of Hawkman is to collect all the pellets across the stage as quickly as possible. Beating the "Sick" high score gives you the most money of the run. Don't take the mode lightly, as this isn't some Pac-man style run through the stage getting different colored power pellets. Each color signifies how you must obtain it. As fun as the game mode is, it also teaches the player to create different lines, or strings of tricks across the stage. If you're skilled and creative enough, you can even attempt to create a line that gets all the pellets in one go.
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The other mode available is Big Head Survival. Remember classic games had the whole, BIG HEAD mode which didn't do much of anything except make you look silly while pulling off Tony Hawk's signature Sack Tap special while transferring between one quarterpipe to the next. Well this mode now makes that silly little cheat into a survival, hence the name. As you play, your head starts to grow bigger and bigger. Once the rate hits 100%, POP! Your head is gone and it's game over. To keep your head from getting big, you have to get a little...big headed, (get it?) Doing quick big combos and loops that give you a big score knocks your growth back to normal and your head back to its teeny tiny size. Do this for as long as possible and obtain the SICK high score for some cash.
Though new game modes is fun and the nostalgia factor is hitting the roof, there's still not enough to really wow a person back to Tony Hawk, especially with such a short game with some of the best stages missing from the two games this HD takes from. It's missing a big fun factor and there's no offline multiplayer to really kick off the nostalgia meter. This game is an attempt to bring back the glory days of the Extreme Sports genre and it missed the mark by an inch. I think this should go back to the drawing board and try again. BlacTape TV gives the download title a 5 out of 10, a metaphor for how this game really comes off as.
