The last, and worst Tony Hawk game? Proving Ground review!

Short version: Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground is the follow-up to Project 8 on the same new engine. It adds Nail the Grab, Nail the Manual, the Aggro Kick, carving and a builder career track, but the new stuff is shoehorned in and the game is so glitchy that some challenges can’t be finished. My verdict: it’s bad.

Each game in the Tony Hawk series has to add something, but all the low hanging fruit has already been picked. They added reverts and spine transfers in Pro Skater 3 and 4, and that’s pretty much the last thing that made a difference. Getting off of your board and climbing stuff made the games less about skating. In Project 8, they added Nail the Trick, where you can go into a slow mo mode and kick the board around. But what’s new this time?

Nail the Grab and Nail the Manual

Speaking of Nail the Trick, which they should have renamed “Nail the Flip,” now there’s Nail the Grab. Hold L2 in this mode and you can grab the board, tweak it different directions and do fingerflips. And varials, which it also calls fingerflips. It slows the game to a halt, doesn’t really feel especially satisfying and doesn’t give you a ton of points. You’d probably never touch it if it wasn’t required so often.

It’s required for bad reasons too. Because the world slows down, the game actually gives you more distance while you’re in Nail the Trick mode. So sometimes you’ll do gaps and it will tell you to use this mode to clear them. That’s just stupid.

There’s also Nail the Manual now, which is awful. Stevie Williams, because you know how tech he is, teaches you how to do this. Hold R2 in the air and you can lean up or down to land in a manual or nose manual. It’s awkward, slow and weird. It took me a long time to get the hang of it enough to beat the first challenge. You can land in the manual, let go of R2 to ollie again and do other kinds of tricks. At this point, it just seems like an alternate, and worse, way to control the game. You can do a manual heelflip to manual really easily in the game. Or you could choose to click your sticks in and do it really awkwardly and weird.

The Aggro Kick

One of the additions that I actually like is the Aggro Kick. Although I could do without that name. If you hit R1, your skater will push, and if you keep the rhythm up, you’ll go a lot faster. At first, this seems like a really good idea. While you’re skating around the city looking for goals, there’s something to do. You aren’t just holding X the whole time.

But the problem is, it’s just shoehorned into the game. You can still get speed by ollieing into and out of grinds over and over. So you can play the game exactly like the last one and be fine. You might never even use the Aggro Kick… except that it makes you do it all the time.

Carving and slash grinds

They used R1 for that, so you might as well use L1 too, right? What trick has never been in a Tony Hawk game? What do you think they could have added? You have your guesses in yet?

They added carving and slash grinds. Which were already technically in the game. You can turn on vert, and you can grind without ollieing. So what’s the point? There is none. Here’s how it works. When you’re on transition, you can tap L1 and you’ll get stuck to the vert wall and ride along. You can ride along on stickers and do this as a trick in a combo. It looks stupid and feels worse.

If you hold L1 instead of just tapping it, you’ll do a slash grind. This could be cool if they made it look different. Maybe if he planted his hand and only grinded for a couple feet, it would look okay. But it’s just a normal grind without a balance meter.

These additions are just stupid. You will never ever do them unless you’re forced to, and it’s the worst way to address the problems with the engine.

Remember in Pro Skater 2 where you could skate skateparks and actually do stuff on them? You could skate a funbox or a hip and it would act like a real skateboard. You had a ton of pop and perfect consistency, but playing the game still resembled skateboarding.

Around the time the Underground games came out, skateparks were useless. You could skate up to an obstacle and next thing you know, you’re in the rafters. Skating real life obstacles wasn’t even possible anymore. So they started to fix that with hacks. Like in THUG with the hip transfers, or American Wasteland, where you could stomp tricks down on banks. It’s the only way to actually land on something without clearing it by a half mile.

This is just the latest version of that. Casually ride up to transition and you’ll get 80 feet of air, so they add in a button press to make gravity stronger so you can actually stay in the pool and grind and carve like you might in real life.

Climbing is back

Something else that’s kind of new is the re-emphasis on climbing. This isn’t a new thing, of course, but in Project 8, while you could get off the board, you never really needed to. It might help to climb a ladder instead of skating all the way up the hill or something like that. But they pretty much never required it. And that’s the only way climbing should be in a skating game.

But here, it’s back in full force. They bring in Bam Margera to show you how to climb on stuff and jump around. It still controls just as badly as ever, except it gets less forgivable as time goes on. They had how many years to get this to work? But they just didn’t.

Glitches and broken challenges

The biggest problem with the game is how sketchily put together it is. When playing, I was always expecting something to break. Even if I just misunderstood how to complete a challenge, I would assume the game was breaking first, because that’s more likely. I’ll give you a few examples.

In one challenge, I’m supposed to be impressing some skaters by grinding around a fountain. I do it, and then I’m just kind of stuck in this mode. I can’t ollie… but I can moonwalk. I have no idea how to get past this. I’m completely stuck. And this challenge was pretty hard with the stats you have at first, so I really didn’t want to start over. Too bad. I had to turn off the system and reload to do it again.

At another point, I had a barrier stuck on me for a while. Later I hit the ground really hard and got stuck in it. Another time, the game just froze solid, and I couldn’t do anything other than reset the system.

Sometimes the hammer icon doesn’t work. This is how you mod something. You’re supposed to see an option pop up. It just doesn’t a lot of the time. I restarted the event and it worked.

In another one, I’m supposed to be learning how to revert into a manual. Which is weird, because it taught me that in the beginning and I’m halfway through the game at this point. But I just keep getting Am. Why? Well, the ramp it sets you up at doesn’t have a wide enough flatbottom. You don’t have enough time for your manual to count before you hit the other wall. So you have to start the challenge and then move so that you’re skating the longer side of the pool.

Or how about this challenge? After learning how to Nail the Grab, I’m supposed to do 5 of them over a gap. It seems pretty clear what to do, but it just never worked. The obvious interpretation is that you need to do 5 grabs. But when you land, it just kicks you back to the top. There’s a timer, so you obviously don’t do one grab 5 times. But I tried every other interpretation of that instruction that I could think of. Maybe it’s not 5 grabs, it’s a multiplier of 5. Considering the new way this is counted, that’s a ton of grabs. But that didn’t work. Maybe you have to Nail the Grab on 5 separate occasions in one combo? Nope, that doesn’t work either. Maybe you have to change your aim and land somewhere else? No. No matter what I do, it just kicks me back to the top and doesn’t give me a warning message or anything. I was never able to beat this challenge.

Much later, I realized that a grab isn’t considered “Nailed” until you hold it for a certain amount of time. So even though I was doing a bunch of grabs, I never technically Nailed them, I guess. But that doesn’t really mean anything. And they don’t even attempt to explain it.

But I’ve got another one for you. In this event, I’m supposed to be taking pictures all over a subway station. It gives me a list of tricks and locations, so here I go. The first thing is to grind the ticket booth. When I do, nothing happens. Not only is there no photo icon, the game doesn’t slow down either, which it usually does. And when I click in the right stick, which is normally the picture button, nothing happens. So I tried the ticket booth, and I tried nailing the manual on a ledge and on the ramp. None of them did anything at all. I even tried stalling on a shopping cart. By the way, good luck actually getting a stall to work. It just does a grind and calls it a stall most of the time. But still, I managed to do it right after a while. There’s no question I did a stall on the shopping cart. But nothing happened.

I have a theory as to why. In the last challenge, when I wasn’t recording, I was doing a series of pictures at different spots. Kind of like this one, but one at a time. I did one and messed it up, so I hit retry. Instead of restarting that picture, it glitched out and took me to the next one. After that, the pictures just didn’t seem to work right anymore.

I don’t know if this was a glitch or not, but how about this? To get into nollie stance, you’re supposed to click in your left stick. When I do it, nothing happens. I was never able to nollie in the game. My sticks work, because I can use them to get into Nail the Trick mode. Maybe someone had to teach it to me to unlock it or something, but if so, that challenge wasn’t required. I went the whole game without nollie stance.

The map and getting around

Another thing that had me really confused is the waypoint map system. Instead of being able to warp to a challenge, you have to mark it on the map and skate there. And that’s fine. But it will try to lead you ways you can’t go. In one case, I unlocked a challenge in another area. It took me up to a load tunnel, then instantly kicked me out when I tried to go in there. There are certain bridges and things that you can take, but you unlock them slowly and it’s not clear how to get around until you’ve got a lot of practice.

Even then, you’ll find yourself skating for a couple of minutes between challenges every time. I really wish I could just pick it off a menu.

Compare that to Skate. The whole world is open and there are multiple routes to get places. The city isn’t divided physically in ways that force you to get from section to section. Obviously this wasn’t a limit of the hardware.

Even when everything is working as expected, it’s still sketchy. Take the 900s, which are frontside now, for no reason. If they called it frontside, that would be one thing, but they don’t. Anyway, if you watch closely, I can land early, glitch out and roll away just fine. Switching grinds, landing in manuals and all that stuff just feels unstable.

It’s almost like they took the engine for Madden or Gears of War, tweaked it until it started to resemble a skateboarding game and just left it like that.

Career mode and the story

So let’s get into the structure of the career. The actual storyline is back to basics, nothing too crazy like the Underground titles. You’re just a dude trying to come up and get sponsors and all that stuff. And I say “dude” because it doesn’t seem possible to play as a woman, which you’ve been able to do in most of the games. Maybe they just ran out of time to record all the dialog in different voices. But for as much as they brag about the updated player creator, you actually have less control than ever.

This time in the career, you’re given different career tracks to follow.

First is the Career skater: do contests, film for videos, take pictures, that kind of stuff. This is the kind of thing you usually see in later Tony Hawk games.

The Rigger track

Next is the Rigger category. I’m saying that very carefully so I don’t get banned from YouTube. But the idea is that this is a collection of challenges about building and customizing stuff. I’ve always disliked this in games. I don’t mind placing a kicker in Skate or something, but this is so clunky and terrible that I always dreaded getting these challenges. Here are a couple of examples.

First, I have to collect construction supplies: screws and sandpaper and stuff. I have to grab them and take a picture of myself doing it by clicking in the right stick. Or I can spend hours trying to figure out how to lay out stuff to do this all in one combo. But it doesn’t work very well. This is one of the first events, so I don’t have a lot of options, just a kicker, not a high, medium and low one. So you’d think that I could put a kicker down and grab that screw icon really easily, but it just doesn’t line up. I miss it over and over and over. I don’t know how I could handle this differently.

Or how about this one? You get 10 minutes to place a bunch of rails to grab some eggs for some reason. You’ll spend a ton of time fighting the camera and the controls to figure out how to lay it all out, and then 20 seconds grinding it.

And then, unlike the contests in the Career category, in the Rigger category you have… contests. Just really weird ones. Like this slice of sadness.

The goal here is to combo on all of the items in the area. There are events like this throughout the game where stuff will light up or get marked when you hit it, but here, you’re completely in the dark. You have these fun obstacles to skate, which are too high to ollie onto and ungrindable. One only seems like you can wallplant on it. So the only thing I could figure out to do was place a ton of kickers everywhere, then do one exact route. I have to ollie over the first one because you won’t have enough speed otherwise, land in a manual and turn really quick over to one side. Ollie onto a container, then ollie onto the next one right away. Wallplant and try to do the same thing on the other side. Of course, it’s harder because the second container is on the close side now. But hit those, then try to squeeze every last ounce of speed to get over to the rail to grind.

Does that sound fun to you? It wasn’t.

I think the thing I dislike about this so much is the fact that I’m skating a crappy level. Sure, I made it, but I only have 4 pieces to use. The developers can make anything they want. I’d rather play something professionally designed than something I have to throw together with a timer counting down.

Hardcore, street challenges and classic mode

So that’s the Rigger stuff. There’s also the Hardcore track.

The idea behind this mode is that you skate for yourself. You get challenges to do big gaps and stuff. It’s basically the same stuff as the Career track, but there’s no camera or anything. You’ll use the Aggro Kick a lot to get speed for certain things. A lot of this stuff is forgettable.

Next up is the street stuff. This isn’t story based, it’s just challenges that exist out in the world. If you played Project 8, you’ll recognize this stuff. Beat the long grind challenge by finding the start and grinding until you pass the other icons. But it has the same problem as the last game: I pretty much never know where to go. Usually, you can figure out how to get the Am rating, but after that, you might have to pick a direction and just commit to it. And you’ll pretty much always be wrong. Trying to get the Sick rating on these would be a huge waste of time filled with frustrating guesswork.

The last thing I wanted to mention is the classic mode. There are arcade units placed around the world that you can fire up to collect SKATE and COMBO letters, get high scores and all that kind of stuff.

It’s a huge waste. The reason the games that had those challenges were good is because the levels were designed for it. They were designed around the places to hide letters and secret tapes and stuff like that. Taking a random chunk of the world and throwing some collectibles in it isn’t any fun. Having these in here makes the game worse, and it just goes to show how far this series has fallen.

Sponsors, phone calls and the team video

As you beat more and more stuff, you’ll unlock sponsors and get pro model decks and shoes. There are little story snippets, like meeting Eric Sparrow. I mean, it sounds like him, but he doesn’t really look that similar.

Every time anything happens at all, Tony Hawk will call you. Displaying this Motorola phone is so hard that the game acts like it’s going to crash every time. I don’t think I listened to a single one of these.

I eventually got to what I think is basically the end of the game: shooting a team video. You’re supposed to get parts for Jeff King, Bob Burnquist and Arto Saari. But Bob’s and Arto’s parts would both launch Arto’s challenge, and nothing happened when I beat it. It might have been possible to get it to work eventually, but I thought that was a good time to quit.

Is it worth playing today?

So what’s the final verdict on the game? Well… it’s bad. It really is. As soon as Project 8 hit, most of us playing at the time knew that the series was over. The new engine just doesn’t look or feel good at all. It’s so sketchy and weird that it feels like it’s going to break constantly.

Project 8 being bad doesn’t necessarily doom this one, though. A lot of times, the first game on a new platform just has to be finished to meet the deadline, and the second one will actually clean it up and make it good. But it didn’t happen here. A lot of the problems could have been patched, but they never released a patch. It was just a last attempt at getting some cash before they stopped making the series as we know it.

Next up are Ride and Shred, the games with the skateboard controller.