Tony Hawk's Underground review (Game Boy Advance)

Year after year, developer Vicarious Visions has made each subsequent Tony Hawk game on the GBA better than the last. Tony Hawk's Underground marks the franchise's fourth installment on Nintendo's tiny handheld. It contains everything that was good about the previous three games while it adds a single new move and a modest set of new features that, once again, inject freshness into a formula that never seems to run out of steam.

As far as the game's hands-on aspects are concerned, Tony Hawk's Underground doesn't stray from the basic setup that's been at the core of every other Tony Hawk game. You get points for performing tricks, like grabs, grinds, and flips, which you need to learn in order to accomplish goals in the arcade and story modes. The most significant change to gameplay in this year's iteration is that you now have the ability to hop off your board and can now walk around. The "run out," as it's called, gives the game's trick system another layer of depth by allowing you to link combos together by stepping off the board for a second or two. Like reverts, pivots, and spine transfers, which made their way into the franchise in previous installments, the run out gives players one more way to transition between tricks.

Far and away, though, it's the story mode that sets Tony Hawk's Underground apart from the games that have come before it. The story mode basically takes the career mode from past Tony Hawk games and puts a role-playing spin on it. Just as the battles in a role-playing game build up a character's attack, defense, and magic ratings, every move you perform in the story mode contributes status points to your custom skater's ratings in a variety of different areas, like hang time, speed, spin, grind balance, manual balance, and so forth. One way to add tricks to your character's repertoire is by collecting enough status points to reach the next level in a particular category. Another way to add tricks to your basket is to successfully complete the challenges placed upon you by the various pros that are situated in each park. If you walk up to another skater and press the L button, he or she will give you a task to perform within a set amount of time, which usually involves the performance of a specific combination or the retrieval of particular items that are scattered around the park. These challenges are also the key to unlocking the areas that are initially off-limits in each park, and they are also the key to earning money that can be spent in the game's skate shop.

The skate shop sells equipment and food items that come into play during the story mode in the form of two meters at the top of the screen. One represents health, and the other represents the amount of safety gear you have equipped. You lose a little bit of health each time you fall off the board, and you can regain health by consuming foods like energy bars and sports drinks. If your health drops to zero, you'll be tossed back to the park's starting point, which isn't such a big deal, except that it's annoying to have to travel back to the area you want to be in every time you end up unconscious. The amount of health that's taken away after each fall depends upon how full your gear meter is. Safety helmets and kneepads increase the size of the meter in varying increments, based upon how worn out the items are.