Tony Hawk Ride review (Wii)

If you're a skater, you may be irked by how the game separates trick types (no skater would ever use the term "tilt trick"), but you'll pick up on the game's expectations easily enough. If you're a newcomer, however, you'll find that Tony Hawk Ride does not welcome you with open arms. Early in the Career mode, training videos and interactive tutorials introduce you to the basics. Eventually, however, the training videos are removed from your career progression and the game asks you to do new tricks without telling you how to perform them. Luckily, there are more videos to help you out, though you'll need to exit the challenge to view them. But in some cases, the game will ask you to perform a trick the videos don't cover, so you'll be on your own. At least you needn't worry about steering if you play on the casual difficulty level because the game takes over main steering duties for you. If you play on confident or hardcore difficulty, in which you must lean in order to steer the board, prepare for an even greater headache.

The Challenge mode, where you complete a series of specific tricks, is where you'll find the greatest frustrations because it requires the most precision from the imprecise controller. Your career also features race and trick modes, yet while they aren't as immediately frustrating as the Challenge mode, you won't get any joy out of them because they're too pedestrian. In the Race mode, you can ollie and grind your way through the race, kick-pushing and picking up power-ups that subtract from your total time while avoiding tokens that add to your total time. Trick mode scores you based on the moves you pull off, but moving the board about willy-nilly results in more impressive-looking stunts than exercising any expertise you've developed in the Challenge mode. This is true even on the scattered half-pipes. Vert skating may be fun to watch, but when your actions on the screen don't necessarily reflect your intentions, there's no sense of reward--no matter how sweet your christ airs look.

Tony Hawk Ride's flaws don't end with the lousy controls. The game feels half finished, offering up the most bare-bones experience possible. Don't expect skater-specific specials or large, high-concept levels. You can free skate, but most of the areas are small and none of them offer the fast-paced freewheeling of previous Tony Hawk games. This is partially because Ride seems to fancy itself a simulation, though it's hard to take it seriously as a sim when you happen upon pedestrians that exclaim their surprise when you almost run into them...in the middle of a skate park. You'd think a leaner game would at least be easy to navigate, but the T-Mobile-branded menus are poorly organized. Intriguingly, the Wii version fixes some interface issues that exist in other versions of the game, but it breaks others. Your stance preference is saved within your profile, so you do not have to confirm your stance (regular or goofy) before each event, as you must do on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Helpfully, your postevent score saves automatically to your profile, so you don't need to reach for a controller every time you qualify for the scoreboard. However, the Wii version does not allow you to select another event on the same course when you've finished a run. Instead, you're forced to exit the course, endure a long loading screen, select the new event, and endure another long loading screen.

The online capabilities of the other versions have been excised here and replaced by a Mii Skate mode, in which you can take your own Miis, or a variety of built-in ones, into the skate parks. Yet in order to cavort about with your Mii, you must play through the same areas with another skater first. It would have been nice to select a Mii as your career skater, but alas, this is just one more way in which Tony Hawk Ride falls far short of its potential. Half-functional controls, bad menus, and shallow gameplay make this frustrating skating game a complete waste of money.