issue 02 August 2025
Grade: B+
Tony Hawk is an old guy these days. The most famous sk8r boi ever to have lived is now 57. A sk8r geezer, if you will; and the video games celebrating his glory days are of an age too. Gamer-geezers who remember losing hours to the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games will welcome this pacy, fast-moving, graphically lavish remake. The Sex Pistols and Run-DMC and suchlike blare in your ears as you guide your skater around any number of wildernesses of kneecap-imperilling concrete. (Gen-Z players will probably be mystified by the floating VHS tapes that you need to pick up as you skate.)
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You can do ollies and kickflips and medusas and acid drops, grinds and spine transfers and skitches, and manuals and reverts and wallplants. You can catch sick air, as I believe they used to say back in the day. Or, at least, you can in theory. Almost the only trick not explicitly covered in the extensive training is ‘faceplant’ because, as it turns out, nearly any combination of buttons achieves that.
The difficulty curve is brutal. Splat, you go. Splat. Splat. Ouch. If this were a medically accurate simulation you’d spend most of the game in traction. That one of the many skaters available as a guest star is the meat-headed space-marine from Doom pays tribute to the implied violence. But when you do stumble over the right button combination and land a high-scoring trick off the halfpipe, leap a moving car or grind a long railing just right, you’ll exclaim: ‘Gnarly!’ Which, is, I imagine, the condition of the real Tony Hawk’s toenails these days.
