Review #557: Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam(Nintendo DS)

 The Hawk train don't stop rollin'

Tony's never looked this angry before.

 Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam on the PS2 was... something. I think the premise was sound, but the execution left something to be desired, and the framerate was just pathetic. Regardless, I liked the concept a whole lot, and I thought it would lend itself well to a handheld game, so lo and behold, I went ahead and gave the DS version a try.

 The main mode is called World Tour, in which you go throughout the game's six locations and complete tasks, or missions. Each location has 9 tasks, and every time you beat three you can then tackle one of the three 'challenges', you only need to complete two challenges per location in order to proceed, but you get stat-ups every time you win a challenge, so you might want to backtrack. Most missions are relatively easy, win a race, win a elimination race(Every few seconds the player that's behind gets eliminated until there's only one), land a huge combo, grind a certain distance, etc. There's about 8 tasks in all, but they didn't feel too repetitive. Missions have rubberband AI, so, sometimes, your stats don't feel as if they mattered, since the CPUs will catch up, and you will catch up to them.

Stages resemble the ones from the Console version, but they are fairly different.

 After you're done, you can tackle Jam Session, in which you have 4 minutes to complete a list of objectives, like classic Tony Hawk, albeit on downward courses made for racing rather than exploring. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't work too well. Then there's Quick Race and Free skate. All in all, it's a pretty decent package, for a handheld game. Stages are large, but there're only six of them, and the only real skater here is Tony Hawk, the rest are cartoony, original characters. The soundtrack is pretty good, even featuring a song from Escape the Fate, every song here fits the theme, and it's nice having banging music to race with.

 Controls are an adequate adaptation from the Playstation games, B to ollie, A to flip, Y to grab and X to grind. Touch controls can be used to easily execute special moves. It works well, and most moves from the series are here, but, but sometimes, after ollie-ing from a ramp, the controls might fail to read your inputs, or when jumping from a manual, your character might get stuck in the manual animation for a while, so it won't register your inputs until later. These are a few odd quirks that don't really get in the way, since they aren't too frequent, but do make for a bit of an annoyance when they happen.

It's funny how races are but a few of the objectives on the game's main mode.

 It's a poor substitute for main Tony Hawk games, but it's a relatively fun, but flawed, racing game. There's nothing here worth writing home about, but it does make for a fun little diversion when you've got a few minutes to kill.
 5.5 out of 10