Welcome, Tony Hawk, to the realm of Madden. The little skateboarding sim that could has become one of the biggest yearly franchises this side of EA, with a new sequel dropping every year since the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater kickflipped its way into our hearts in 1999. The Tony Hawk series cannot subsist on roster changes the way most sports titles do, and thus, each installment has had to reinvent the skateboard wheel by adding new features, tricks and missions to create some sort of difference between the current version and the year previous. With Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, this series has reached its sixth iteration. Can the series continue to innovate and impress, or will this be the game that wipes out?

Story:
Tony Hawk’s Underground was the first game in the series to incorporate an actual storyline. It wasn’t award-winning by any stretch of the imagination, but it did provide another reason to play and see your on-screen alter-ego realize his skateboarding dreams. In the case of THUG2, it’s unfortunate to see the story take a step back.

Realizing the growing popularity of Viva La Bam, Neversoft has given Bam Margera, a roster member since THPS3, a much bigger role in THUG2. Subtitled “World Destruction Tour”, THUG2’s story mode is about a skateboarding clash of the titans- Tony Hawk versus Bam Margera. The world is their stage as each superstar skater has recruited a team to pull off amazing tricks and destructive stunts across the globe. The team that loses has to foot the bill for the entire trip.

While it does make for some funny scenes, THUG2’s storyline really doesn’t do much to draw the gamer in. For one thing, your character isn’t given the choice of which team to join- a crime in this day and age of interactivity and choice. You never really grow any allegiance to your team either, for a variety of reasons. Finally, this game wastes the opportunity to develop characters out of any other professional skateboarders. In fact, there may be a few cuts from THUG’s roster. A shame, seeing how the original games served to make pro skaters better known.

Gameplay:

Thankfully, Activision has allowed a choice for those less than enamored with the story mode with the addition of classic mode. Hearkening back to the day of two-minute time limits, letter collecting, and secret tape searches, classic mode attempts to extend an olive branch to old school THPS fans who feel the series went downhill with each free-roaming element added. Unfortunately, those new elements don’t mesh that well with this returning mode. Take the hidden tapes, for example. What used to require precision skating can now be conquered by simply getting off the board and climbing. Many of the stages have become too big for this mode as well, making a “stage sweep” (completing all the goals in one run) a near impossibility. It’s still pretty fun as a whole, but it lacks the luster the mode had way back in the day.

Story mode has a different setup from THUG, in that you can control multiple characters in each stage by finding them, thus unlocking a new set of goals. At least one character on each stage is a non-skateboarder, with their weapon of choice being anything from a motorized scooter to an electric wheelchair. The vehicles control like ultra-fast skateboards, except their trick lists are extremely limited and they lack the ability to be dismounted. It’s a nice addition, and it’s definitely better than the outright inclusion of vehicles in THUG, but there’s still a lot of work to be done on that facet of gameplay. The goals in THUG2’s story mode are much more ambiguous and easier to exploit via glitches, which makes for a less entertaining experience as a whole.