Where's my licensed music?!
The game features a Story Mode, a Classic Mode, and a 2 Player Vs Mode. There are 7 skateparks total which is pretty nice. The Story Mode plays like the console game, you skate around looking for NPCs that will give you a task to fulfill, you increase your stats and create your own skater. Classic Mode is a bit lame, it gives you 2 minutes to complete a set of tasks on any of the seven levels, the problem is... every stage has the same objectives! Get the COMBO letters in a single combo, collect all SKATE letters, perform X point combos and amass X total points and find a secret tape. That's it. No level-exclusive objectives, no nothing. It's better than nothing, but it feels uninspired nonetheless.
The story mode... oh boy, the story mode. You start off by creating a skater, but you get almost nothing to work with. Two pair of pants, two shirts and a few hair colors. Everything else is slowly unlocked as you complete goals, 17 per stage(Except the Training stage, the Vans stage(that has 18) and the Warehouse stage, that only has 8 and no unlocks). Completing objectives is also how you upgrade your stats. Something I really liked, just like the console version was the first open-world Tony Hawk game, they too tried something like that on this release, except that every level is interconnected through a mini-loading screen. That's fairly neat, and ambitious, but... stage exits aren't highlighted. You are just supposed to find them and remember how every level connects with each other. There's no map, no nothing. Lame.
And that's kind of a big deal, because the game is played from an isometrical viewpoint, so you don't get much screen real state to see in front of you. And levels are surprisingly large, which makes finding NPCs a bit of a chore. And some NPCs only appear when you fulfill some objectives, so there's a lot of aimless wandering as you hope to come across the mission-giving NPCs. And try not to accidentally exit the stage, or your pending goal list will delete itself, so you'll have to find the NPCs again. This issue also extends with a few goals that require you finding stuff. Stages are simply too large and the viewpoint is less than ideal, making these missions super boring. It's even worse when you get collecting missions that encompass more than one level. One of the worst of the bunch is when you have to collect 20 items throughout four stages. There's no indicator that there are 5 items per zone in the first place. Oooh, but the worst mission in the entire game is the final one, in which you must grind all five Oldschool gaps, one per level. Where are these gaps? Who knows. I had to look up a youtube video in order to finish it.
While the missions are lame... the gameplay is really solid. They managed to cram most of the basic Tony Hawk mechanics into such a few amount of buttons and it works well most of the time. The isometrical angle makes it a bit hard to position yourself sometimes, or even to understand some of the level geometry, but the controls are solid. There were also a few buggy half pipes here and there that made me bail my tricks as soon as I got on the air, but nothing too bad.
The visual presentation is really good, they managed to make the game look cellshaded, and very, very colorful. As good as it looks, the soundtrack is rather lacking. I understand why it'd be hard to put licensed music on the GBA's pathetic sound chip, but what little music there is was kinda grating on the ears.
It sucks, but despite the game play so well, all things considered, the way objetives work range from boring to dull. All the collect X amount of things just work against the game's strength, which in turn isn't helped by having levels that are so large, which don't play well with the viewpoint either. AS disappointing as this game is, the fact that they got the gameplay to work so well on the GBA... makes me hopeful that maybe the previous games on the Advance will fare a bit better.
5.0
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