Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (Mobile)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 8.2 (4.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Steve Palley
• Reviewed on: 10/11/2004
• Originally published on GameSpot: Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (Mobile) Review

At one point in time, the name Tony Hawk was synonymous with big air. Since the advent of Activision's illustrious line of Tony Hawk skating games, however, the pro endorser's handle has come to mean big business across a range of consoles--and even on mobile. Jamdat proved that it could bring the series' freewheeling action to the cell in 2003's Tony Hawk's Underground. The company's mobile version of THUG2 fine-tunes its predecessor's gameplay and updates its presentation to match new technological standards. Thanks to the game's wide variety of tricks and terrain, there's enough skating action here to keep you busting combos for hours.

Your nameless skater in THUG2 is caught between a rock and a hard place. World-famous skaters Tony Hawk and Bam Magera (also of Viva La Bam fame) are embarking on a competitive world tour, and they both want to use your insane shredding services for their own ends. As you travel with them from place to place, they'll order you to sow all sorts of creative anarchy while you bust fat moves and collect bonus items along the way. Who knew that derailing a cargo train in Germany would embody the irreverent skater ideal?

THUG2's playable levels include Boston, Barcelona, Berlin, Sydney, New Orleans, and the skater shantytown of Skatopia. Each of these locations has a skate park bordered by steep ramps and filled with all sorts of rails, ramps, stairs, and jumps to fool around on. To progress through the levels, you have to satisfy a certain objective, which usually involves whomping a set amount of private property and/or innocent bystanders with your board. For instance, to get through Boston Common, you have to knock the heads off five minuteman statues by jumping off ramps at the right time; the objective in New Orleans requires you to collect party beads and use them to inflict (censored) toplessness on some nubile girls. The levels are also littered with a variety of detritus to snag and special bonus tasks to perform, all of which give you points. It takes a fair amount of exploration to pick up all the extra cash, cell phones, and special items and to perform all of the extra jobs on a level--especially given that several of the level layouts are expansive vertically as well as horizontally. These levels require a lot of precise jumping and grinding to exhaust completely.

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