Tony Hawk’s Project 8 Gameplay
At the start, the gameplay is similar to all the rest of the Tony Hawk games. If you know how to play those, you can pick up Tony Hawk's Project 8 and go for it. I played it on X Box 360 - they had a Playstation 3 demo as well, and they looked exactly the same. Exactly.The story for Tony Hawk's Project 8 is that Tony Hawk has come to your town, and is putting together a skateboard team called "Project 8." So, you need to prove your skills to get on the team. Your town is also full of pro skaters just sitting around, who all want to give you fun challenges and teach you new tricks (see pictures of Daewon Song's challenge), spot challenges, and piles of other people to talk to, get challenges from, and much more. Tony Hawk's Project 8 has a LOT of interaction with people standing around - in fact, if you run into them and knock them over, sometimes they'll chase after you and beat you up!
Tony Hawk's Project 8 has a built in ranking system, so you can see where you stand among the other amateur skaters (Ams) in the town. The list has 200 skaters in it, and half of them are actual real-life amateur skaters. The ranking is set up randomly when you start your game (I was wondering how they ranked who the top Am was, and who the worst one was!).
As you play, each challenge has an Am, Pro and Sick difficulty level. You can play through the entire game without ever getting above an Am rating. You won't get as exciting of an ending, but the fact that you don't have to get incredible at the game opens Tony Hawk's Project 8 up to a whole section of video game players who don't want to spend all their time with the game, but just want to play it casually. And, the Sick rating is seriously hard to get to. Tony Hawk’s Project 8 will feature online ranking as well, in a variety of areas (not just highest score).
Tony Hawk’s Project 8’s New Focus Mode
Tony Hawk’s Project 8’s new Focus Mode is what really sets the game apart for me. Sometimes you are forced into it, but any time you do a trick you can push yourself into this slow motion, super intense mode where the camera zooms onto your feet (see photos of the Nail the Trick sequence). There, you control each foot with each stick on the controller, and you can do different trick combos, even spinning varialy, but landing is tough. Well, not really tough if you just try one trick, but I always got greedy and tried to work in triple kickflips with a 180 varial … and shoot, why not toss in a heelflip there at the last minuet. I bail of course, to the fun sounds of my bones crunching as my skater’s body rag doll flops along the pavement, bouncing off handrails. Press start, retry last challenge, and do it all again!Tony Hawk’s Project 8 Next Gen Skateboarding
Tony Haw's Project 8 is packed with all kinds of new features that I haven't even mentioned - there are weird challenges where you have to move obstacles around to try and get the best line, challenges to try and get the worst bail (what's "Bail" mean? see bail screenshot) and rack up the highest hospital bill (similar to the car game Burnout), filmer challenges (see thp8 filmer challenge screenshot), new tricks, and a huge seamless world to skate in. Honestly, Tony Hawk's Project 8 is a fun game.So what's bad about Tony Hawk's Project 8? Well, not much! In typical Neversoft fashion, it is only 2 player on one machine. This is something I complain about a lot, but I'm not a hardcore gamer. I'm casual, and I like to play games with friends. I really enjoyed playing 4 player HORSE, or Tag. Get some friends together, sit back and enjoy. But, if you want 4 players on one machine, you still need to go all the way back to Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. You'd think, with the popularity of games like Halo, that developers would capitalize more on the party aspect of games, but who knows - maybe my friends and I are alone in wanting to play games together! I asked them about this, and in Neversoft's defense, this is a whole new engine, and there are several little extras like this that they say might make it into next year's Tony Hawk game. When I asked about it, the answer felt more like they’ve never really thought about it before, so I wouldn’t be waiting for this feature!
Otherwise, honestly, I can't find anything else to complain about. Given, we only played the parts of the game that they wanted us to play, so there might be huge problems hiding somewhere. But I don't think so. Tony Hawk's Project 8 looked smooth, polished, and ready to go. I even played a female character, so they definitely have that angle covered (in the last game, there was a female character to play, but she was hard to find). Really, Tony Hawk's Project 8 looks like a next gen Tony Hawk game, and it looks like a must have for any gamer / skater. Check it out this fall on X Box 360 and Playstation 3, and see the Tony Hawk’s Project 8 Image Gallery to see some screenshots for yourself.
