As fun as it is ugly.
Well.... the grass isn't always greener. The Tony Hawk games were never quite the lookers, but this game has visual glitches everywhere, the textures are muddy to the point that some cutscenes falter because you can't read what you're supposed to. Audio has always been a huge part of these games, but audio quality here is that of a potato. Audio lines have a nasty clicking on them at times, although the music is passable enough at least.
Controls are as good as they can be. There's no R2 or L2, so the R and L button have to work for both trigger buttons and... it can be messy at times. Camera control is terrible because there's no right analog stick, so good luck with that. While on foot you can use the analog stick to move alongside you, and while skating you can use the left analog stick, the thing directly below the directional pad which you are using to move, to look around. No bueno.
The new levels are.... alrightish. Only one of them is mandatory, which goes directly after the tutorial, something I don't necessarily agree with because the next level is much easier. The other three new levels are optional, as you get branching paths. The new levels are... mediocre. I'm not a fan of 'open' levels because it's easy to drive out of bounds, which sucks. The final new level, Vegas, was pretty good though. So 3 mediocre levels and 1 good level... I'd say nobody is missing much, plus, these levels would later reappear in American Wasteland.
In the end, Tony Hawk's Underground 2 did what it could. I'm grateful I could play this game on the go if I so wished it, but this is no substitute for the console original. Having more levels is fine, even if most of the new content is mediocre, and I can take a loss in graphical fidelity, but it's the controls that that makes this version of the game infinitely inferior to its console release. It's still a good game though!... but I'll stick to the original release.
8.0
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