Introduction

Tony Hawk’s Project 8 was first demonstrated to us last E3 as a non-playable, non-interactive demo video. It showed a slow-motion combination of tricks and the developers talked about how the new animations make tricks more realistic, how the artwork is now truly next-gen and their plans for the game. Project 8 was going to be less story-driven and would have custom tricks or some such. That’s pretty much all we knew.

Activision demoed a build of the game for us last week. The developers discussed their plans for the game again and showed us a demonstration of the Nail the Trick mode, which basically looked like bullet time tricks. A brief run-through on a map of the game seemed to show that gameplay hadn’t changed all that much. While using real stunts, Tony Hawk continues to sequence improbable combos and tricks together across environments that should be lethal to the average skater. In short, it again seemed like nothing special, no great step forward in the skater game world.

Then I got to play it. After some fumbling around with the regular tricks, I finally figured out how to active Nail a Trick mode and from there on in it was a solid hour of pure if clumsy bliss. You know how thumbsticks have made boxing cool in Fight Night, and how they help NHL 07 rise beyond its generally spectacular failure of an interface to an enjoyable on-ice game? That’s basically what they do for Tony Hawk’s Project 8.

Nail the Trick is activated in mid-air by clicking both the thumbsticks. Each stick corresponds to a foot on your skater. Each cardinal direction – up, down, left, right – imparts some sort of motion on the board. So you choose to move your left stick down and cause the board to spin on its X axis. You have to hold the left stick down to keep your foot clear as the board spins. You can input another command with either the right or left thumbstick when either the deck or the trucks are passing by that specific foot. So if you’re running out of air and need to land, you’ll bring your foot back in line with the board. Hitting the trucks with your foot is more difficult but gives more points, and if you time it right and press perfectly in your specified direction on the thumbstick, you gain bonus points.

Soon enough, I forgot about the multiplayer matches I was engaged in (yes, the game can handle Nail the Trick in multiplayer, it slows down the characters in bullet time on screen so they seem to defy gravity). I spent my time looking for the biggest, tallest jumps so I could practice Nail the Trick. It’s as if the rest of Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is window dressing for this godsend of a game design decision. The next-gen graphics? They make it look better when you’re in slow-mo. The new singleplayer mode with less story? Just less obstacles to having more time to string tricks together. Multiplayer? Just more ways to show off what I can do.


Speaking of multiplayer, Project 8 features a sweet new mode called Walls, which plays a lot like the light cycles game from Tron. The player has a wall in his color appear behind him wherever he skates. The more points in his trick, the longer the wall stays. The object is to get 10 kills by forcing 10 hits against your wall. So the incentive is there to find a populated area rather than hide in your own corner, but then you have to be wary of being a victim yourself. Fortunately, after getting up from being hit by a wall, you have some limited form of invulnerability to escape your current tangle of walls.

In singleplayer, there are some new features like Impress the Locals, where you do tricks for money (yeah, you read that right). The cash can be used to buy better equipment. The difficulty level is now somewhat custom. You no longer declare your difficulty before you play, rather you achieve Am, Pro, or Sick ratings the better you do at a particular challenge. The Sick ending obviously require the player to finish the game on Sick, which looked rather challenging in the demo we saw.

The game should be here in Q4 2006.