American Sk8land is a handheld adaptation of Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, retaining the same sort of story mode and setting of the console game, but toning down certain elements to make it more accessible to a wider market. Of course, these compromises only affect the story mode and its goals – the core elements of the Tony Hawk series are in fine form here, and best of all, most of the extraneous crap that has plagued the recent console games is nowhere to be seen; no car driving, no off board crap, no Bam Magera antics – just pure skateboarding: the way a Tony Hawk game should be.
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Brendan was a sk8er boi.
The game is broken into a number of different modes, but the main single player meat is centred on the Story and Classic modes. The story mode has you roaming the countryside with Mindy and Tony, much like the console game, and talking to citizens of the various locations to get goals to accomplish – rinse and repeat till you’re at the end. The goals found here are easy enough for those who are new to Tony Hawk games, but for veterans of the series, the lack of challenge is on the verge of being ridiculous. There’s also a Kid mode which makes these challenges even easier; perhaps designed for very young children.
Classic mode, on the other hand, returns the game to the goal-like structure of the first three Tony Hawk games, and actually offers a reasonably good degree of challenge and enjoyment. Players are given a list of 10 goals, and need to accomplish as many as they can within a two-minute run. These goals range from collecting S-K-A-T-E and C-O-M-B-O to getting specific scores from combos and total scores, just like the older games. Some of the goals can be a little easy for veterans, but it’s still really fun. The levels are reasonably big, but seem to be designed more towards skating and tricking, as opposed to the ludicrously oversized levels of the more recent console efforts.
Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land’s most intriguing mode is its Wi-Fi option. While limited to only two players, American Sk8land offers enough options to make the multiplayer game enjoyable. Trick Attack awards the victory to the skater with the highest score, while the Score Challenge rewards the player who makes it to the target score first. Combo Mambo is a combo contest where the skater with the best single combo score wins the challenge. There’s a game type that’s new to the series called The Price is Wrong, where players need to get their scores within a certain range – going under or over this range will cost you the match. The statistical tracking that is offered with the online mode is pretty good, but it is disappointing to see some of the better multiplayer modes like Horse and Graffiti omitted – it’s forgivable in this case given that it’s Vicarious Visions’ first shot at an online game for the DS, but we won’t be so lenient in future. The game can also be played locally if you have a chum with his/her own copy of the game.
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Luke said, "See ya l8r, boi."
Vicarious Visions have always been noted to be a versatile group when it comes to handling ports and challenging jobs (see Doom 3 for the Xbox), and they’ve shown with Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land that they also have a mastery of the Nintendo DS’ hardware. American Sk8land is one of the few 3D titles on the system that looks really good, thanks to the use of cel-shading, as well as fast gameplay speed without compromising the framerate. The only downsides are that the game can look a little rough thanks to the lack of texture filtering and anti-aliasing, and the draw distance on some of the in-game objects isn’t too flash. In terms of sound, American Sk8land holds up the series’ tradition of supplying a good variety of rock/punk music, which sounds reasonably good given the relatively crappy DS speaker. Players can also record their own sounds to play in online matches, which obviously leads to people recording farts and curse words – it’s a good feature, but has unfortunately been abused by the masses.
Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land is a return to the foundations of the series, thanks largely to its emphasis on tricks and combos, rather than the extraneous crap and goofing around that has plagued the last four games on the consoles. It’s good to see Vicarious Visions' talents in full effect – they’ve conjured up some really good technical achievements (cel-shaded 3D with a good framerate, and the first Wi-Fi DS title), but have also managed to produce a good game at the same time. American Sk8land is a bit easy, but it should provide hours of entertainment for all handheld gaming fans, whether they like skating or not.
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