Tony Hawk's American Wasteland review (PC)

Don't let the recent name changes fool you. Tony Hawk's American Wasteland is the seventh Tony Hawk game developed by Neversoft in as many years. Over the years the series has had installments that made dramatic changes to the formula, but the more recent installments have focused less on gameplay or structural changes and more on including a story. American Wasteland is the game that finally makes good on the story thing by offering a plot that's far more interesting than it's been in the previous two games. It also attempts to put all its levels together into one big take on Los Angeles that's free from loading times. That part doesn't work out quite as well as the back of the box would have you believe, but the real issue with American Wasteland is with its gameplay. You'll find the requisite handful of new tricks, but most of the story mode feels like a brief tutorial, and the classic mode isn't deep or long enough to hold the attention of series veterans. It's got more of the same fluid skating gameplay you've come to expect from the series, but the game's over almost immediately.

Story mode puts you in the role of a nameless skater from the Midwest who's given up on living in the middle of nowhere. Tired of being hassled by The Man, you run away to Los Angeles with dreams of skating in the area where skating all began. Things are going fine until just after you step off the bus, which is where you get jumped by some toughs who make off with your gear. A raspy-voiced girl named Mindy takes pity on you and sets you off in the direction of an adventure that sends you all around the city of Los Angeles, where you'll thrash, skate, and destroy as you find a crew of squatting vandals to call your friends, a skatepark to call your own, and...an alien costume. When you first start, you'll be a pretty weak skater. Most of the moves you've come to expect from the series, like manuals and reverts, won't even be available to you until you learn them. You'll learn most of the basics pretty quickly, but it'll take a little while before you learn to use special tricks, flatland tricks, and focus.

You'll also learn the game's new tricks, like the bert slide, which is the ground-based, surfing-like maneuver brought back to the skating hive-mind by Dogtown and Z-Boys. You can also get off your board and swing it at pedestrians (which isn't terribly useful), and you can learn some freestyle running techniques for wall climbing, flips, and so on. You can also find and ride BMX bikes in the game, which come up in a couple of goals but are mostly there for you to earn money, which you'll need at various points in the story. The BMX bike controls are vastly different from the skating controls, and they're surprisingly well thought out--provided you have a good PlayStation 2-like gamepad for your PC. Bike games have traditionally just mapped that to a button and a direction, just like any other trick. Here you'll have to do a backflip and a 180 at the same time to get credit for a flair. The BMX stuff is minor, overall, but it's an interesting diversion.

Few of these new tricks really matter, because most of your goals in story mode simply ask you to quickly grind or natas-spin on an object, or wall-plant or sticker-slap something while watching the fun. Most of the goals are based around the skate ranch, an area found just outside of Beverly Hills that's mostly a large empty dirt lot with a halfpipe in it. One of the major thrusts of the story is your crew's desire to trick out the ranch, so you'll always have goals that involve you busting out a piece of the city so that it can get added to the ranch. There are a lot of different pieces to add to the ranch, but since most of them are required goals that get the story moving again, you won't have to go out of your way to get them. You'll have a few things to do in the skate ranch itself, but it's mostly just there for show and for free skating.

The main problem with the goals is that they're ridiculously straightforward and leave nothing to the imagination. If you need to grind some support cables to loosen a sign on top of a theater, the game sets you down directly in front of those support cables. After you grind them, you'll be asked to pull off a wall-plant on the sign itself. Again, it drops you into the exact position to pull it off. The game really seems bent on holding your hand every step of the way. While forcing you to go out of your way to line yourself up might not be the most fun thing in the world, the way THAW is set up makes the entire story mode feel like a tutorial. If you've kept up with the Tony Hawk series over the years, you'll nail most of the goals on your first or second try. While it has a "sick" difficulty mode that's meant to make the game more challenging, it still lines you up just right and still forces you through all the early move-learning tutorial stuff, which is decidedly un-sick.

The saving grace of the story mode is that the story it tells is actually pretty good. It follows the standard "ragtag group of misfits' struggles to save the place they call home from evil real estate moguls" plot that drove such classic films as Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. But along the way, the characters become a little endearing, and most importantly, the game doesn't beat you over the head by shoehorning the pro skaters in whenever possible. When you finally do start encountering the game's pros, you do it in a way that feels natural, which is great. That said, the plot's got some holes, and the last mission hits you unexpectedly, exacerbating the game's short feel. If you were any good at playing previous Tony Hawk games, you'll probably be done in four or five hours.

A big part of the story mode is that it tries to present the entire city to you as one large skateable environment with no load times. That's true in theory, but it's not nearly as pure as it may sound. The city's levels are all separated by tight hallways you have to skate through to change areas. So you're technically still in control, but these hallways are lame and pointless and really might as well just be load screens. The game starts to load the new area when you enter the connecting area, which usually causes some stutters and skips in the frame rate. On some machines, the action just stops for a second. If you want, you can catch a bus from area to area, which saves you the hassle of having to skate from one end of LA to the other. Since you can walk around the bus while the interior of it shakes onscreen, this technically isn't a load time, right?

Each area is pretty large and feels at least somewhat different from the other ones. In terms of raw outdoor LA skating, you'll get Hollywood, Santa Monica, downtown, Beverly Hills, and East LA. But you'll also skate in an indoor skatepark, tear up an oil rig, and eventually get access to a casino, though this casino is taken from the PSP version of THUG2, so it's not exactly a new level. The casino is the last area you'll see in story mode, which is pretty disappointing if you played THUG2 on the PSP and already saw this level. The level design throughout the game is full of huge skate lines that let you extend combos into strings of tricks that take you all over the level. It's at a point where if you're good at keeping your grind and manual balance meters under control, you can do tricks and combos forever. The million-point combo that felt so skillful four years ago is now the order of the day, since some spots feel like you can hop off anything and land on another trickable object almost automatically.