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Tony Hawks Pro Skater review thread

Here's my review of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

1 Game boots
2 Controls have an effect
3 Graphics appear on screen
4 PS4 does not explode while game is running
5 No major spelling mistakes
6 Missions load when you select them, most of the time
7 Connects to the internet
8 Disk wasn't cracked or anything
9 Does contain skateboards like it's supposed to
10 Saving works

Total score: 10/10, possible Game of the Year?

Saving doesn't work. It corrupted my save!
 
That last page had spazchicken like

takeyourL.gif


joining his friends at Robomodo and Activision like

6a8bf48e93a7461ebf998d60e92076c2.320x320x80.gif
 

BruceCLea

Banned
Sad. I remember when I played really hard in a tennis tournament and my dad was really proud of me. We went to a store and bought Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. What a great game. It's amazing how low this franchise has sunk.

You have to wonder how one of the top publishers in the world lets this shit happen. Seriously.
 

TheMan

Member
man, i'd love to hear from tony himself about how he really feels about this game. surely he knew this was garbage before it came out- i get that it's in his best interest to pretend otherwise.
 

Rembrandt

Banned
They do know that a good Tony Hawk game would do numbers, right? They know people were clamoring for a new Skate game and now was a great time to fill a void, but nope. How fucking hard is it to make a decent Tony Hawk game?
 

ZangBa

Member
Everything I've seen of this game isn't very good, but not any worse than a 4 for me, at least until I can play it for myself to feel how bad it apparently plays. It still looks like it could be fun for a couple hours, the glitches make me laugh.

I was never a big fan of the older Tony Hawk games like most people are, but I did like them. My favorite is the first Underground, I wish they made more in that style.
 
Here's my review of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

1 Game boots
2 Controls have an effect
3 Graphics appear on screen
4 PS4 does not explode while game is running
5 No major spelling mistakes
6 Missions load when you select them, most of the time
7 Connects to the internet
8 Disk wasn't cracked or anything
9 Does contain skateboards like it's supposed to
10 Saving works

Total score: 10/10, possible Game of the Year?
I watched the Giantbomb quicklook of the game before I made my post. I saw no glitches in that video. The main thing they were complaining about was the fact that it wasn't any better than the first three TH games and they didn't like the slam mechanic. At that time, the game looked like at least a 4/10 to me.

In my opinion, the 10 scale is redundant anyway and when I see a 1 and 2 it leaves me to believe that the reviewer is basing his score on emotion rather than actually playing the game with an objective eye.

Yes, I do believe that basic functionality should be reserved for the first two points on a 10 scale. It's a very large scale and a decent (but still considered garbage by many) game usually comes in around 5 or 6/10 on average from all the game reviews I have read in my life.

Upon seeing more videos of THPS5 not booting up on XB1 unless you change accounts and numerous glitches and bugs throughout the game, now I understand the 1's and 2's a little clearer. The game doesn't fully function.

People made the argument that they could make a character move on a screen and would deserve at least a 1 or 2 based on my argument. If it was based on part of a bigger game, then why not. If it's just a character on a screen, then it's not a game. What is Space Invaders and Geometry Wars past controlling a character on screen? At it's core, it's characters randomly moving and targeting the player character and nothing more past that, mechanically. There's no advanced AI, level design or mind bending puzzles. That's all it takes to make moving a character on screen, into an actual game. A game that can achieve very high scores in fact so why wouldn't basic movement and functionality be considered as part of a game score, especially one as large and redundant as a 10 scale, that's often even fractioned to make it even more redundant and ridiculous? If it controls good it's worth a mention and if it controls bad it's worth a mention, I think everyone would agree with that. It shouldn't just be a given.

toythatkills, all of that you posted as a joke should be reserved for the first two points in a 10 scale, imo. Basic functionality is the foundation of what makes a game and should still be considered in the score if it's done right. I have now seen that in the case of THPS5 it has not.
 

J4g3r

Member
I noticed someone on my friend's list was getting trophies in a game called "Tony Hawk World" last night.

It was showing up as "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5" in my PS4 friend's list, but in the activity feed it was listed as "Tony Hawk World".

Last minute name change before reveal?
 

Iacobellis

Junior Member
I noticed someone on my friend's list was getting trophies in a game called "Tony Hawk World" last night.

It was showing up as "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5" in my PS4 friend's list, but in the activity feed it was listed as "Tony Hawk World".

Last minute name change before reveal?

Whoa. Definitely sounds like it was going to be a mobile game.
 
I wrote a review after around 20 hours with the game, and had this to say.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is the gaming equivalent of a pet store choosing to sell a dead parrot to customers. You are obviously going to receive complaints once your patrons find out, but the establishment will remain blindly ignorant once they come pouring in. The parrot is dead, stiff, bereft of life, and it rests in peace; just like the Tony Hawk franchise now forever will be.

This is not a game, it’s a black hole where no fun can exist, and any hope the Tony Hawk franchise had to reboot itself died a slow suffocating death within. No one should buy this. Not at any price. Not even as a joke. It is not often that a game sours me so much that I end up ranting, but that’s what this travesty has done. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is broken on all possible levels for a game to be broken. No amount of promise, patches, or fixes can repair this one. The flaws on show are irredeemable. Not only does the game miss the mark, it accidentally smashes into one it never even aimed for. It is such an all encompassing mess that a publisher with any morality at their core would have never allowed this disguised vomit to hit market.

http://darkzero.co.uk/game-reviews/tony-hawk-pro-skater-5-xbox-one/
 
Metro Gamecentral gave it 2/10

http://metro.co.uk/2015/10/05/tony-hawks-pro-skater-5-review-as-bad-as-you-heard-5421380/

In Short: The game clearly isn’t finished and even it was the lack of ambition, and budget, is painfully obvious at every turn. A sad, pathetic end to a classic games franchise.

Pros: Some of the stage designs aren’t too boring and if you’re lucky enough for the game to work that long you can still chain moves together in the old style.

Cons: Even if the game worked properly it’s still a pale imitation of the original, with bland level and mission design. The bugs and glitches are some of the worst we’ve ever seen. It costs £50.

Score: 2/10


Sounds like activision revived and destroyed a franchise in one go lol
 

gossi

Member
Somebody was asking how this sold - it came 11th in the charts. That's really, really low for a game of this price.
 
1's and 2's from a scale of 10 review is so hyperbolic.

Does the game boot up? Does the character go right when you press to the right? If "yes" then we should now be at least in the 3's.

From what I've seen, the grinding mechanic, the tricks system is all functional. The animations are decent and the game looks at the very least, playable. It may not be great, good or even what you expect a skating game should be in 2015 but a 1 and 2/10 is ridiculous and irresponsible.

I don't agree that a game just needs to boot up to earn a minimum 3/10, but if's it's not completely broken and the controls are fairly responsive then a 1 or 2 out of 10 is definitely too harsh. However, I cannot personally comment as I have not played it, and lots of the footage I've seen has made it look very glitchy, although I imagine some of that has been edited to make it look particularly bad.

I imagine a lot of the extremely low scores are driven by complete disappointment from fans of the good games in the series, which may or may not be unfair on the game depending on your nostalgia (or lack of) for the originals.
 

Pillville

Member
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is the gaming equivalent of a pet store choosing to sell a dead parrot to customers. You are obviously going to receive complaints once your patrons find out, but the establishment will remain blindly ignorant once they come pouring in. The parrot is dead, stiff, bereft of life, and it rests in peace; just like the Tony Hawk franchise now forever will be.

tumblr_nvqyaxMJqH1s96c36o1_400.jpg
 
How fucking hard is it to make a decent Tony Hawk game?

How hard is it to remake a Tony Hawk game even. They had a shot at a traditional Tony Hawk game with THPS HD and they couldn't even get that right. Surely that must've been a red flag to Activsion at the time, that game must've sold well enough though for them to put this out.
 

liquidtmd

Banned
How hard is it to remake a Tony Hawk game even. They had a shot at a traditional Tony Hawk game with THPS HD and they couldn't even get that right. Surely that must've been a red flag to Activsion at the time, that game must've sold well enough though for them to put this out.

Screw even that. How hard is it to even Port a Tony Hawk game. A uprezed port of 1-3 I would have happily bought full price
 

Dunkley

Member
So basic functionality like booting up and loading the character easily validates for a 2-3 rating on a 1-10 scale?

Nice, Big Rigs, The Letter, Meme Run and my UE3 project where I made a block you can shoot should be critically-acclaimed then.
 

Nameless

Member
No intentional disrespect to Robomoto, I'm sure they work hard, but how did they get yet another crack at THPS after making arguably the three worst games in series and contributing heavily to its plummet?
 

liquidtmd

Banned
No intentional disrespect to Robomoto, I'm sure they work hard, but how did they get yet another crack at THPS after making arguably the three worst games in series and contributing heavily to its plummet?

I'm guessing good corporate relations and they work cheap.
 

Saven

Banned
Lmao with game informer having a kinda high review for this complete garbage of a game. I see they are still an absolute joke of a magazine even after all of these years.
 

RionaaM

Unconfirmed Member
I watched the Giantbomb quicklook of the game before I made my post. I saw no glitches in that video. The main thing they were complaining about was the fact that it wasn't any better than the first three TH games and they didn't like the slam mechanic. At that time, the game looked like at least a 4/10 to me.
So you are calling people's opinions "hyperbolic, ridiculous and irresponsible", all of whom played the game before writing their reviews, while you haven't played it yourself? That's... silly, to say the least. It may not look that bad to you, but if you haven't put your hands on it you are in no position to criticize other people's views. You can, of course, but it has zero value in a discussion.

spazchicken said:
In my opinion, the 10 scale is redundant anyway and when I see a 1 and 2 it leaves me to believe that the reviewer is basing his score on emotion rather than actually playing the game with an objective eye.
I completely disagree. If anything, not using the 1-2 range would be scoring based on emotion, as you believe a game is worth 2 free points just because.

spazchicken said:
Yes, I do believe that basic functionality should be reserved for the first two points on a 10 scale. It's a very large scale and a decent (but still considered garbage by many) game usually comes in around 5 or 6/10 on average from all the game reviews I have read in my life.
Not at all. You know what I call a game that doesn't even work? A fraud. The thought that a game simply refuses to run doesn't even begin to cross my mind. It's like... I don't know, like opening a book and seeing that every page is blank. That's theft. I don't think the 1 and 2 points in a 10-points scale should be reserved for non-working products, as these don't (or shouldn't) exist. How can you even review something that doesn't work at all? It makes no sense.

The idea of a game deserving a 3 for passing the threshold of what a game is (launching and responding to inputs) is laughable. I wouldn't give a 1 to a phone that doesn't turn on. My review would only say "THIS SHIT IS BROKEN. PHONE DOESN'T TURN ON. DON'T BUY OR GET YOUR MONEY BACK YESTERDAY" in a big red font. Big Rigs runs and can be controlled by the player, does that mean it deserves a 3 for that?

spazchicken said:
Upon seeing more videos of THPS5 not booting up on XB1 unless you change accounts and numerous glitches and bugs throughout the game, now I understand the 1's and 2's a little clearer. The game doesn't fully function.

People made the argument that they could make a character move on a screen and would deserve at least a 1 or 2 based on my argument. If it was based on part of a bigger game, then why not. If it's just a character on a screen, then it's not a game. What is Space Invaders and Geometry Wars past controlling a character on screen? At it's core, it's characters randomly moving and targeting the player character and nothing more past that, mechanically. There's no advanced AI, level design or mind bending puzzles. That's all it takes to make moving a character on screen, into an actual game. A game that can achieve very high scores in fact so why wouldn't basic movement and functionality be considered as part of a game score, especially one as large and redundant as a 10 scale, that's often even fractioned to make it even more redundant and ridiculous? If it controls good it's worth a mention and if it controls bad it's worth a mention, I think everyone would agree with that. It shouldn't just be a given.
Scoring a game based on its controls is certainly an important part of a review, as gameplay has a deep impact in the experience. For example, BioShock looks good and has a great atmosphere, but I disliked the gameplay so much that I wouldn't give it a good score. This isn't the same as giving points away for "just working". Just working is the baseline; if a game doesn't meet that it isn't worthy of being reviewed, let alone sold.

spazchicken said:
toythatkills, all of that you posted as a joke should be reserved for the first two points in a 10 scale, imo. Basic functionality is the foundation of what makes a game and should still be considered in the score if it's done right. I have now seen that in the case of THPS5 it has not.
Of course, when basic functionality is broken you rate the game with the worst possible score. You just don't give it bonus points for doing the bare minimum required for it not to be a scam.
 

DarkOneX

Member
Rented this yesterday, oddly I found myself playing it for about 7 hours straight lol. I will say it is kinda fun and addicting trying to get the stars and open the new levels, but there is obviously so much wrong with the game. I couldn't get over how crappy it runs, it's so stuttery most of the time. It's sad how more than half the time you cannot start the missions and have to exit to the main menu and reload the stage, I did find that seemed to have something to do with starting it online mode as when I did private match the missions would always load for me then. There's fun to be had in this game with some patching, if they even bother, but I cannot see it being worth more than $15 tops.
 

whitehawk

Banned
I noticed someone on my friend's list was getting trophies in a game called "Tony Hawk World" last night.

It was showing up as "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5" in my PS4 friend's list, but in the activity feed it was listed as "Tony Hawk World".

Last minute name change before reveal?
Could be. Tony said he had to fight hard for the thps5 name.
 
Behind each of those names is a team of people that worked god damn hard to release these games. There's so many more factors than just the people developing. Time constraints and budget constraints are the reason for these games being sub par. Not the actual people at these developers. Blame the publishers, not the developers where there's people like you and me who are just as annoyed and disillusioned by the releases as we are.
Then they shouldn't bite more than they can chew? As in, don't be the lowest bidder and actually ask for a bit more realistic deadlines. If you're forced to swallow this kind of conditions in order to get work for your studio, maybe your studio is not really that good...

There's a reason people feel relieved when one of those names is not associated with the remake/remaster of a beloved IP.
 

Varth

Member
Did anybody manage to try this without the patch? What's available on disc? Also, latest PR from Acti/RoboModo makes this seem like it's always online. Can't be, right?
 

Mahonay

Banned
Rented this yesterday, oddly I found myself playing it for about 7 hours straight lol. I will say it is kinda fun and addicting trying to get the stars and open the new levels, but there is obviously so much wrong with the game. I couldn't get over how crappy it runs, it's so stuttery most of the time. It's sad how more than half the time you cannot start the missions and have to exit to the main menu and reload the stage, I did find that seemed to have something to do with starting it online mode as when I did private match the missions would always load for me then. There's fun to be had in this game with some patching, if they even bother, but I cannot see it being worth more than $15 tops.
The $60 price tag really seems to be the most egregious thing about this game.
 
The $60 price tag really seems to be the most egregious thing about this game.

Yeah, that really threw me for a loop, especially when it turned out it was going to be full retail on disc game. I for sure thought this was going to be a $15 - $20 downloadable release when video started coming out.
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Bruh. This series died in 2007 when Skate dropped.
I keep seeing people post this sentiment but I just don't get it. Skate and Tony Hawk are completely different. Tony Hawk is an arcade style score attack game. Skate is an attempt to simulate skateboarding on a controller. They aren't the same at all.

It's akin to saying that we no longer need arcade racers now that we have Gran Turismo or Forza.

Soo, how does this game compare to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD, visually and gameplay wise?
I actually kind of enjoyed HD (on the PC at 60fps). This is a much worse experience.

I thought for sure they could improve on THPS-HD but, alas, that's not the case.
 
Did anybody manage to try this without the patch? What's available on disc? Also, latest PR from Acti/RoboModo makes this seem like it's always online. Can't be, right?
I did.
The game is always online, but private lobbies don't require online to work. So you can still do missions.
The last level, Mountain, doesn't appear until you patch it.

Don't think the patch fixes any issues. It is required to make online work, hence the file size.
 

joecanada

Member
1's and 2's from a scale of 10 review is so hyperbolic.

Does the game boot up? Does the character go right when you press to the right? If "yes" then we should now be at least in the 3's.

From what I've seen, the grinding mechanic, the tricks system is all functional. The animations are decent and the game looks at the very least, playable. It may not be great, good or even what you expect a skating game should be in 2015 but a 1 and 2/10 is ridiculous and irresponsible.

totally disagree. To even be rated as a video game, it must function as a game. If it didn't boot up, crashed at start or didn't even function (character moves right when you press right?? this is like basic function of a game), it should receive a zero. it does not function and has no place in any rating scale.

From there, the game should earn points based on the redeeming qualities it has, is it fun, are the graphics good, sound, music, missions, story, or whatever else the game does or is meant to do.

Based on the fact this game barely runs, it does in fact crash, doesn't work as intended, glitches out, and has barely any redeeming qualities, in no way would I expect this to score more than a 2 or 3.

by your logic, if a movie actually played in your Bluray player, and was able to rewind and fast forward, it would automatically get a 3/10.
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
I've heard stories of this game not booting up, crashing at main screen, etc. And this is after the game needed a 7+ gig patch. I can't imagine what it would be like without that.

Quite frankly if this game doesn't deserve a 1/10 I do not know what does.
 

YoungHav

Banned
This topic made me wiki Skate and wtf EA closed Black Box studios??
I keep seeing people post this sentiment but I just don't get it. Skate and Tony Hawk are completely different. Tony Hawk is an arcade style score attack game. Skate is an attempt to simulate skateboarding on a controller. They aren't the same at all.

It's akin to saying that we no longer need arcade racers now that we have Gran Turismo or Forza.
Hahahah,you have a point. There is room for both types.
 
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