Now Playing: Tony Hawk's Project 8

 Because I'm smart and felt the need to start yet another game.

 Tony Hawk was one of the most prolific franchises back in the day. While I was a casual player at best, I loved the heck out of Tony Hawk 4 and Underground 2... I did dabble into Tony Hawk 3, PS2 version, and didn't like it too much though. Sidenote: This is one of the busiest months of the year, when tests, projects and exams start piling up... and I decided to start another game. As if I didn't have enough stuff on my plate already. As if I didn't have about 10 games to finish already. I'm so smart sometimes!

 Regardless, Project 8, what're my feelings on it? Well... Mixed. Firstly, and more importantly, the Open World aspect... I kinda like it, and kinda don't. I think having a huge environment full of interconnected skate parks is interesting. But I also miss the themed, closed-off environments from the previous games. The other biggest change lies in the games physics, it seems like they were going for a more realistic, heavy feel to the game. Jumps are lower and last shorter, skating around seems a bit slower as well, and comboing tricks lacks some of the... snappiness from the previous games. Whenever you linked tricks together you'd get both visual and audio cues, so you knew that stuff was happening, this time around you only get the visual cues, having more subdued sounds when tricks get strung together.

 There's also the character creator which, quite frankly, stinks. You get limited 'styles' of characters, and then you only get a very few options to customize your character's looks. Its very underwhelming. I've already opened up two areas(The skate park and the main city-thing) and the goals so far have been rather drab and dull, and the spray paint challenges can be a bit of a pain to figure out where the game wants you to go next.

 When it comes down to it, I do like Project 8, it's been rather fun so far, but the new physics are not my cup of tea and the missions seem to be lacking a certain spark that previous games had had. So, as much as I like it, I would rather be playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. Regardless, I must've played an hour at most, so there's still time for me to learn to like the new physics and for the missions to get more creative.