Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 Review – You Win Some, Lose Some

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 was a phenomenal package that made lifelong fans like myself fall in love with its quarter pipes and rails all over again. It was a wonderful tribute to the 1999 and 2000 originals, but there was one big bugaboo that left me and other fans wanting: the exclusion of the series’ third entry. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 felt missing from the first remake, stripped from the games it most closely resembles. And while that problem may seem solved with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4, from the outside, developer Iron Galaxy has made a number of decisions that are likely to leave fans of the originals disappointed, even though this second remake is still an excellent Tony Hawk game.

The original three games fit together perfectly, with each subsequent game adding new mechanics that made the series’ trick system feel complete by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. Each game was also structured in the same way, giving players two-minute skate sessions to complete as many goals as they could, performing tricks and earning high scores, before moving on to the next two-minute session. It’s a format that works well, so much so that you’ll have a hard time stopping yourself from going for one more run.

However, it’s not how Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 was structured, with the fourth game instead opting for freely roamable levels that mission-giving characters called home. Time limits only came with specific challenges when the likes of pro skater Geoff Rowley asked you to steal police officers’ hats or a college student pleaded with you to take revenge on the local frat boys. In THPS 3+4, the levels from 4 have been retrofitted to behave and play like levels from the first three games. That means fewer goals per level, no mission-givers, and a time limit to top things off.

The decision to turn 4’s levels into facsimiles of those in the original trilogy is a disappointing one, even if they are still a blast to skate around in. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 was when the series started to inject more personality and add more edge into the formula, which was expanded even further in the Tony Hawk’s Underground games. Now, instead of helping Ollie the Bum fend off the pink elephants he’s hallucinating, you just collect all of the inexplicably floating elephants because the game tells you to. And a lot of goals, such as racing the inline skater in College or feeding the hippos in Zoo, are missing from the game entirely.

In fact, Zoo doesn’t even have animals and, along with Kona, has instead been turned into a competition level, the likes of which were only seen in the original three games. Competition maps are restricted to three one-minute rounds with no goals. The only challenge is to rack up a huge score and place first, making these levels significantly less interesting–two-minute rounds with an assortment of challenges would do much better justice to these levels. THPS 4’s distinct character is missing, which makes THPS 3+4 feel less like a labor of love and more like a product capitalizing on the first remake and shoving together pieces that don’t fit.

The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 side of things also has some bizarre anomalies, making small changes that often seem unnecessary and tend to weaken the fun found in the original. The remake starts you off with Career mode, which provides a set list of goals for each level regardless of which skater you’re playing–you can switch skaters throughout and retain your progress. Originally, each skater had their own tour, allowing you to play through each one individually, with some of the goals changing based on whether your character was a Vert or Street skater. Instead of forcing a Street skater to perform a more difficult Airwalk over the escalator in Airport, you would instead be asked to Crooked Grind around the baggage claim. 3+4 discards those changes in the experience, meaning it doesn’t matter who you play as; you will be required to perform that Airwalk. The S-K-A-T-E letters, those collectibles floating in tough-to-reach places in each level that players need to grab as one of their goals, also no longer wait in spots that are specific to your kind of skater. Instead, they’ve been assigned to a single set of locations in each level across Career mode.

Another odd choice is a new requirement to find a toolbox before completing the “Raise the Ferry” goal on Cruise Ship. This necessity wasn’t present in the original game, and for some reason, the tool box isn’t highlighted and floating the way similar objects are, like the axe for the “Help the Thin Man” goal in Suburbia. Skater Island’s secret area is already revealed from the jump, rather than hidden until players discover it, which was confusing at first, but I suspect it has to do with another secret area that the developer added to the once-secret pirate ship. These changes may seem small and insignificant to some, but they’re disappointing and confusing to fans who find these levels as iconic as World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros and who are looking for that nostalgic skate in a remake that should aim to honor those memories.

Some of those memories actually can be revisited in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4–eventually. After completing every single goal on every single level, you unlock Pro Goals. These are an extra set of five challenges on each level, which vary in difficulty. Collecting five cans of Red Bull on a level is relatively easy, for instance, but collecting the C-O-M-B-O letters while holding one continuous combo can be a little trickier. Pro Goals offer a satisfying challenge and even stumped me in some cases–everyone knows passports are harder to find than cans of Red Bull anyway. If you’re having trouble completing them, you can also increase the time limit you have to complete them to an hour, giving you enough time to scour the levels and figure out what you need to do to check off a difficult goal. Once you’ve completed every Pro Goal, you unlock Solo Tour, which works almost exactly like the default Career mode in the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3–stat points, cash, and Iron Galaxy logos remain found.

Getting to Solo Tour may be a satisfying and rewarding endgame, but the progression you have to go through to unlock it is anomalous for the series. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 added Solo Tours after launch, but they were never something you had to unlock. The fact that the default way to play the original trilogy is the remake’s locked-away endgame is a bit bewildering. It’s also disappointing that stat points remain for each skater in Solo Tour, because by the time you’ve unlocked it, you should be able to nearly max out every skater’s stats, making them play far too similarly to one another.

Despite these many grievances, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is still a Tony Hawk game and, as expected, plays wonderfully. Mashing out those familiar button inputs and watching them translate into redone animations of your favorite moves is endlessly gratifying, whether it’s a Kickflip into a Benihana before reverting into a manual, or utilizing trick extensions to keep the most ludicrous grind you’ve ever seen going for ages.

The levels are also beautifully redone, bringing incredible life to maps once stuck in the PlayStation 2 era. Steam and sparks fly in THPS 3’s Foundry, while THPS 4’s San Francisco at sunset provides a beautiful vista for tricks. And despite maps on the THPS 4 side having fewer NPCs, they’re still great skating playgrounds. Zoo’s lack of animals is glaring, but revisiting the map now feels like we’re actually revisiting the location years later, after it has been shut down, abandoned, and outfitted with some new ramps and half pipes.

The only maps not featured from the original games are THPS 4’s Carnival and Chicago, the latter of which was actually borrowed from Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX 2. To make up for these omissions, Iron Galaxy has made three brand-new maps, all of which are actually better than the missing maps. In fact, these new maps feel right at home. Movie Studio features everything you could want from a level, with an awesome backdrop of green screens and props, while Waterpark rightfully hosts some great pools as well as a menagerie of water slides that you can grind, manual down, or even use to link combos to other parts of the level. The third map, Pinball, reminds me a lot of Skate Heaven from THPS 2, feeling like an unlockable level you’d get for completing everything before it. It’s a life-size, zombie-themed pinball table, and while it’s not the best level in the game, it’s certainly memorable and boasts its own set of fun pinball-esque challenges.

In addition to great mechanics and marvelous levels, as a series, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is responsible for introducing people to a litany of pro skaters and a cacophony of bands and rappers. THPS 3+4 continues that trend by bringing almost every skater back from THPS 1+2 and the original games–sorry, no Darth Maul or Wolverine–while adding quite a few brand-new skaters to the franchise. For a game that is so arcade-y and over-the-top, it’s great how it manages to bring players into the real world of skateboarding, introducing people to the young new skaters of today. The only raised eyebrow I have about the cast comes from THPS 3+4 requiring you to unlock Bam Margera, while also forgoing his decks and alternate costumes.

As for music, THPS 3+4 has a fantastic soundtrack made up of most of the memorable tracks from the original THPS 3 and 4, while adding an awesome selection of punk, metal, and hip-hop that fits perfectly with the rest of the selections–there’s no “I’m a Swing It” by House of Pain, but I am happy to report that I once again have “Norf Norf” by Vince Staples stuck in my head. Filling your special meter also adds a hefty helping of reverb to the music, which makes the whole game feel like shit just got real.

Create-A-Park returns from THPS 1+2 with some new options, most notably the ability to add goals to a park. Create-A-Park in the first remake saw some interesting levels from creators, but none that I wanted to spend a good chunk of time in. Goals, on the other hand, feel like a really smart addition that could encourage players to check out levels for longer than just a quick session. It remains to be seen whether the creators come, but Create-A-Park has the tools to be successful.

Multiplayer also sees a return with a bevy of competitive modes like Trick Attack, where you battle for the highest score; Combo Mambo, where you try to link the highest combo; and Graffiti, where you do tricks on sections of the level to paint them your colour. Jumping into a lobby of players and utilizing the excellent in-game voice chat makes for an exhilarating contest to be the best skater in the room.

However, it’s with the new HAWK mode that multiplayer really shines. HAWK is broken up between Hide rounds and Seek rounds. Hide rounds require players to skate through a level and place their H-A-W-K letters in places where their opponents hopefully won’t find them. Meanwhile, Seek rounds task you with finding other players’ letters; you score points for each letter you find belonging to another player and for each of your letters that stays hidden. In levels like Airport, the mode feels like a race to snatch all the letters before other players do, leading to tense fights to land the right tricks to reach a cleverly hidden letter. In large levels like Waterpark, map knowledge helps a lot, as there are so many tricky little spots to hide the letters in. HAWK is a superb new idea for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, one that I’m excited to play more of as more people jump online.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is a phenomenal game of skate, one that fans would flock to without hesitation if it weren’t for some of the strange decisions regarding the game’s Career mode and THPS 4 levels. Some of the changes feel needless, and overall, THPS 4 just doesn’t fit as well into the same structure as the original three games. It’s also disappointing that newcomers won’t be able to experience the fourth game the way it was originally intended. Once the initial disappointment fades, however, you’re left with a remake that still handles as well as these games ever have, and that’s something that’s worth playing no matter who you are.