by: John Olin

November 19, 2005

As for one the game’s big draws, with no load times that isn’t true at all. When going from one area of LA to another, you have to go down tunnels, or halls, and they are fairly long halls, that cause the game to slowdown while it is loading the next area. Basically, there are load times, but they are fancy load times that let you walk around. There are a good amount of areas to skate in, and finding all the nooks and crannies of each level makes it all the much better when playing multiplayer. The bad thing is, there aren’t a lot of nooks to cranny out because the game makes all of it so obvious. The game also does a bad job of keeping you from exploiting the tricks, and I have found myself doing million point and two million point combos like they were nothing. If you are a skilled THPS skater, you could easily get at least five sometimes ten million point combos. Another great thing about the Xbox 360 version, is the controller is much more natural with the game since you now have two new shoulder buttons.

The classic mode is a breath of fresh air, but nothing to huge. You will play levels from older Tony Hawk’s that just aren’t hard to complete with the attributes you have in THAW. In a two-minute run it isn’t impossible to complete nearly all the tricks, such as getting Sick scores, high combo scores, secret tapes, and so on. Eventually you do get to a doomsday level, which is pretty cool, but the classic mode also serves the purpose of upgrading the stats of the Pro Skaters you have to choose from, and a custom character if you chose to make one. When their stats are upgraded, everyone gets the same changes.

Multiplayer lets you battle a friend on your Xbox 360, or you caa finally go online and challenge people. You have trick attack, combo mambo, capture the flag, goal attack, and fireball throwing modes. The fireball-throwing mode is pretty crazy, but the only modes that hold up and don’t get old fast are the staples of the game like trick attack. You can now finally go online and challenge up to eight people at a time. The most annoying thing is the actual matchmaking, and the bare-bones approach they have done to online. You don’t even get scoreboards for anything! Hopefully, they won’t cut this crucial corner with the Xbox 360 version of the title.

There are some cool “create” modes in the game, most of which is create-a-skater. Creating a skater can be used in Classic Mode, or online multiplayer. Strangely, your created skater can never be used in Story Mode, or you can never use your Story Mode character in Classic, or multiplayer. It is a bit inconsistent, but you get over it. You can also create parks, tricks, graffiti and so on. If you like the create things, you will have plenty o’ fun wit this. Strange thing is, when you create a graffiti tag, no one online can see it, and all they see is a basic graphic. It gets very annoying. Another addition to the Xbox 360 version are Game Achievements, which help give you an idea of your progress or to show if you are doing better at the game than your friends.

Visually THAW holds up but it is using an aging engine that hopefully will get retired within the next year. The character models are done pretty good, and the areas have nice detail, but you can’t help but feel things could be far more fluid in the overall game. Each area is very vibrant and colorful, with structures, and landscape that is very unique to that area, so at least you won’t get the feeling that the environments were rushed. The areas with Chinatown are especially detailed, and have a very intricate design. The bad thing is, the game is really only just crisper on Xbox 360, not taking advantage of the hardware what so ever, and sometimes you get strange graphic glitches thanks to the developers not really tailoring the game for the system.

The sound in the game is what you would expect with the dead-on skating noises, and serves to make new players cringe when they hear the smacks of your body on the pavement. The soundtrack is very big this time around, and goes across plenty of genres including heavy metal, punk, and hip-hop. You can of course use your own soundtrack also. The voice acting in the game is done pretty good, but you will probably skip through most of it as you go along. Most annoyingly though is that the subtitles in the game don’t normally go along with the voices you hear, and it will really get on your nerves, but other than that, you can just skip over.

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THAW may not be that hard no matter which way you cut it, but it is still as addictive as any Tony Hawk titles. You have the story mode and the classic mode to go through, and when you are done with that you can finally play on Xbox Live. The strange thing is, there is something different about this one, like it was a bit rushed, and that doesn’t reward you at all. Still it is a pretty entertaining experience, that I definitely believe newcomers will find fantastic, and die-hard fans will love, if you can see yourself paying an extra $10 when the same exact product is already available on Xbox.

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