The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series has been close to my heart ever since I was a kid. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is especially dear to me as it was my first foray into the series. It was the perfect mix of humor, gameplay, punk rock, and hip-hop, and helped shape the way my personality and taste in music would evolve from that point forward in my life. I remember the first time I heard AFI’s The Boy Who Destroyed the World and House of Pain’s I’m A Swing It while skating through Foundry, wondering why I had never played this series before. I remember being blown away when I found the secret pirate ship area in Skater Island and wondering what other hidden secrets I missed in the previous levels. These memories are some of my favorites as a kid playing video games in the early 2000s.
With the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, I was excited to go back and relive those memories that I’ve held so close to my heart over the years. I was also thrilled to play through Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 for the first time in years, as it is the game I’ve returned to the least of the titles I loved. I’m happy to say that after all these years, there is still a special charm and feeling with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series that most other games could only dream of capturing.
2 Minutes to Midnight
Those familiar with the original Tony Hawk games should be familiar with the gameplay loop of this remake. You either choose a skater from a list of pros or you can create your own skater to complete a list of goals in two-minute runs. There is a great variety when it comes to these goals that range from basic score attacks to causing an earthquake in Los Angeles. After you 100% all levels in the game, you then unlock Pro Goals for all levels, giving even more challenging goals to accomplish. You will keep replaying these levels, learning lines that you can use to combo together high scores and collectibles that are spread out throughout the levels. Among these collectibles are additional stat points to invest in your skater, cash to spend in the shop, shop expansions, and hidden decks.
Almost every level is expertly crafted and has its own personality and theme. Classic levels like Foundry, Alcatraz, Airport, and College are given makeovers to allow them to be more exciting and fun to skate through than ever before. There were a couple of times I stopped and looked around a level and was shocked by how well they recreated these iconic locations and the detail that has gone into them.
There are some levels that I wish they had expanded on or improved, however. For example, Kona remains a very boring level with not much to do or create lines on. London also fails to have a very fun layout to play around in, and the goals are some of the more frustrating ones to complete. Besides not sprucing up some locations, one level in particular was a slight disappointment for me. In the original THPS 3, you have to grind a particular Jolly Roger flag to unlock the outside area and gain access to the pirate ship outside. I know it seems minor, but when I discovered this in the original game, it was such an exciting and shocking moment. In THPS 3+4, this outside pirate ship area is accessible from the beginning without much fanfare. They did try to spice this level up a bit with another small secret area, which I appreciate, but I still would have wished for this level to have had its original structure and hidden the pirate ship a bit more.
Faster Than the World
Beyond the career mode, there are also multiple game modes to play online in multiplayer. Most of these are returning games from the previous titles, such as Graffiti, Combo Mambo, Trick Attack, etc. There is also a new game mode called HAWK. In this mode, you play a form of hide-and-seek where you and an opponent will hide the letters H-A-W-K around a level. After the hiding phase, you and the other player then race to see who can collect all the letters first. It is a pretty fun little new addition, but I don’t see this mode being played over the more traditional and classic modes available. Also returning from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is Speedrun Mode. This mode challenges you to play through each level and complete all of its goals as fast as possible. It’s a fun challenge for those who want to test their knowledge and skills.
I’ve never been a huge fan of multiplayer modes in the Tony Hawk games, preferring to just play around in the career modes and try to beat my own high scores. However, if you are someone who enjoys testing your skills against others and looking for a more competitive experience, THPS 3 + 4 has enough of this content to keep things interesting after you complete career mode.
Not the Same
Let’s address the elephants in the room: Yes, there are a lot of songs from the original releases that did not make it into these remakes. There are already a lot of people who have shown their anger and disdain for the decision to include a ton of new songs rather than just maintaining all the original songs. Also, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4’s campaign has been revamped to match the previous three titles in the series by having a two-minute timer (although you can increase the time to up to an hour) with a list of goals to complete, as well as removing two levels, Chicago and Carnival, from the game.
While I agree that I wish they stayed more true to the career mode of the fourth game, I do think that the 2-minute runs are still really fun and make the experience more cohesive as a package. Being able to bounce back and forth in the career modes of both games without having to change how you approach each level allows you to get into a groove while playing through them. I also think the one-hour timer is a nice compromise for those who would rather take their time exploring the levels and have a closer experience to the original release.
The choice to include only a handful of original songs while bringing in a lot of new songs to highlight more artists is exactly how they should have handled it. Licensing music is very expensive and complicated nowadays compared to how it was in the early 2000s. It was likely deciding between only licensing the original games’ soundtracks or using this as an opportunity to highlight new artists and bands. Obviously, they chose the latter, and I think that is more in the spirit of the series. The reason we are so attached to those original soundtracks is because we discovered them through the games. Why shouldn’t new games (even if they are remakes) celebrate this tradition by introducing new songs to us again that we can fall in love with? I had never really listened to IDLES before playing THPS 3 + 4, but now I’ve listened to most of their discography on Spotify and have become a fan.
Also, we should remember that this is someone else’s first time playing a Tony Hawk game. This soundtrack, twenty years from now, will be the nostalgic playlist for some future middle-aged Gen-Z or Alpha gamer. We don’t always need to cater to our nostalgia in the most extreme way possible in order to call it a successful remake.
Better Off
THPS 3 + 4 is the best way to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and a great way to experience Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. Those looking for a 100% faithful remake of these titles will be disappointed with some of the changes and omissions, especially fans of THPS 4. However, if you just want to revisit these titles and remember why you fell in love with this series in the first place, jumped on with the previous remakes, or are someone completely new to the series, THPS 3 + 4 is the best skateboarding game you can buy on modern consoles. Here’s hoping we can see some full-scale remakes of THUG and THUG 2 somewhere in the near future.
Disclaimer: Activision provided a PlayStation 5 copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 for review purposes.
