Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2

Genre: Compilation / Sports (Skateboarding)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Split-Screen), 2-4 Competitive (Local Wireless), 2-8 Competitive (Online), Online Content Sharing

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Activision Blizzard

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

I started out writing this like a normal review, but it… well, it kinda’ got away from me. So this will read a little differently than my usual stuff. As such, you get… section headlines!

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A History of Hawk

The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skateboarder series has had quite a journey since the first game in the series was introduced on the original PlayStation in 1999. Before this, “extreme” sports games hadn’t really established themselves as anything more than a mildly amusing distraction at best, with occasional games like Skate or Die getting a little notice, but otherwise it would be hard to even call this a “genre”.

When Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater burst onto the scene, it changed everything. This was a transcendent experience with far-reaching appeal that managed to grab the interest of gamers who otherwise had zero interest in skateboarding (myself included), thanks to its gravity-defying trick system and a combo system challenging players to risk it all to hang in there just a little bit longer to top their last high score. And then there was a presentation so steeped in skateboarding culture that even a skateboarding neophyte like myself could tell that the game’s developers at Neversoft had a true passion for the pastime that went well beyond just trying to make a good game.

After this, the game’s sequel Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 would raise the bar even higher one year later, filling the game with plenty of fun secrets and a new move called a “manual” that further helped players tie tricks together into even longer combos. Many players still to this day swear that this remains the best game in the series (I personally think that the series reached its peak with Pro Skater 3’s revert move and Pro Skater 4’s more open-ended levels).

From there, the series was riding high for quite a while. Developer Vicarious Visions surprised everyone with their port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 for the Game Boy Advance, which not only did an excellent job interpreting the gameplay of the series in an isometric view for a platform with only four buttons, but also being a launch title that showcased the power of Nintendo’s new handheld by including polygonal skaters despite that the Game Boy Advance hardware wasn’t really intended for any sort of 3D visuals. The games received ports to numerous other platforms that generally performed similarly well, with most game platforms getting at least one, if not many, of the Tony Hawk games. Even odd game platforms like the Nokia N-Gage and Tapwave Zodiac received reputedly respectable ports of Tony Hawk games. And by the time the Tony Hawk series was 5 or 6 entries deep, it had consistently delivered great game after great game.

Unfortunately, developing yearly installments in a series eventually takes its toll, and by the time the series reached its seventh installment, American Wasteland, players and critics complained that the Tony Hawk games were feeling samey and failing to innovate like earlier games had done. Rather than taking time off from the series to deliver something truly worthy of the franchise, the Tony Hawk games started flailing at experimental ways to keep things fresh, like the racing-focused game Downhill Jam and the peripheral-focused Tony Hawk Ride (noteworthy more for its $120 price tag than anything fun in the game itself), as well as additional underwhelming efforts like Project 8 and Proving Ground.

By 2012, a series that once changed the face of videogames was now on life support, with rushed, buggy, and critically-trashed games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD and 2015’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, the latter of which was generally seen as a disgustingly naked last-minute cash-grab to push out a barely-playable game before Activision lost the Tony Hawk license.

For five years, that remained the legacy of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise, a series that started out strong, remained the pinnacle of the genre it more or less created for over half a decade, then fell into decline as its publisher seemed intent on wringing every last drop of money it could out of the franchise rather than giving it a chance to catch a breath, with its last entries being the most cynical of cash grabs. Neversoft was by now long-dead, with a large portion of their staff laid off in one of Activision’s repeated rounds of mass layoffs, and the rest subsequently folded into Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward. This, combined with the abysmal release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 and the loss of the Tony Hawk license seemed to be a sure sign that this series was decisively dead.

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The Hawk Flies Again

Dramatic title, right? Well, in any case, just about everyone was surprised when Activision Blizzard announced that a Remake / Compilation of the first two games would be seeing release in 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Simply titled Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, the game would be developed by the one living developer most familiar with the series during its golden years, Vicarious Visions, working with resources from the original games and consulting with members of Neversoft’s former staff to ensure that this release was not only faithful to the beloved originals, but also delivered the same level of quality players expected from the series at the height of its popularity.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a one-to-one remake. The game retains a few moves added in later installments of the series such as the revert, although these are optional – players who prefer can change the settings to change the gameplay back to the more limited move sets in the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. This release also incorporates both games into a more interconnected experience through some clever use of achievements and unlockable cosmetic enhancements for your skater. Both games’ campaigns are still accessed separately in menus (in any order you like), but your character’s progress and unlockables carry over from one to the other.

With music licensing being what it is, not all of the classic punk and hip-hop songs from the original games would be coming back… but most of them would, including the iconic Superman by Goldfinger, as well as other great songs like Dead Kennedys’ Police Truck, Bad Religion’s You, Powerman 5000’s When Worlds Collide, Anthrax & Public Enemy’s Bring the Noise… I could go on, but suffice it to say, this game’s music list combines two of the most iconic tracklists in videogame history… along with 37 new tracks, all while giving players the option to customize the combined soundtrack as they like. The roster of skaters was also updated to include both classic and new skaters like Tony Hawk’s son Riley, although it loses licensed characters like Spider-Man. On the bright side, in Spider-Man’s place we now have a version of Officer Dick voiced by Jack Black, which is amusing.

The game’s levels have been kept mostly faithful to their originals, while adding a few new secrets to collect. It should be noted that while all 19 of the original games’ levels are included here, this can’t quite be called a comprehensive collection of the games’ contents, as the original Xbox-exclusive Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2X included 5 exclusive levels that are not present here. Nor, for that matter, does this game include the three Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 levels that were made available as DLC in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD.

This game also revamps the create-a-park level builder, which still allows for players to place individual pieces in their custom parks, but there are also now “smart” pieces that can be molded to create unusual shapes. These custom parks can be uploaded for others to enjoy as well – I’m getting ahead of myself here, but to give you an idea, I encountered one level designed to copy the layout of Super Mario Sunshine’s Delfino Plaza. In short, creative types have plenty to work with here, and non-creative types can enjoy the fruit of their labor.

The online play has also been revamped, and even on the Nintendo Switch, this experience works smoothly and is pretty user-friendly, allowing players to create a local game using two-player split-screen, play with friends online, or simply hop into an online game with random strangers, with the game automatically setting up goals for players to compete in. I’ll talk more about a Switch-exclusive issue with multiplayer in a moment, but suffice it to say that even on Nintendo’s handheld, this game still works impeccably well in most multiplayer modes.

And now that I’ve talked about features, I should probably get around to the big question – how does it play? Well, pretty darn good. I’ll admit, it has been a long time since I last had my hands on a Tony Hawk game, so I can’t say if I’m just rusty or if this game’s physics are a bit more unforgiving, but in either case this game does feel a bit tougher than the Tony Hawk games I remember, with a sorta’ steep learning curve. But even with this issue, the game still plays wonderfully, and as rusty as I felt, playing this game still felt like riding a bike again, with all my muscle memory from the good ol’ days coming back to me before long (though not without more than my fair share of faceplants). Newer players may feel a bit daunted by the relatively high difficulty here, but to offset this, the game does have a pretty good user-friendly new tutorial narrated by Tony Hawk himself.

I also feel like I should mention that a few of the levels in the first Tony Hawk game feature a very linear downhill design that seems a bit dated now and doesn’t mesh well with the limited-time nature of the game, as it makes it that much more difficult to hunt down a missing pickup in the level. This version does allow you to warp back to the beginning of these levels when you reach the end, but this still means that it may potentially take a while to get from one point in each level to another. However, I’m not sure that much could be done about this in any remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – if the remake is to be faithful to the original at all, these levels would have to be reproduced with this flaw intact.

Of course, one of the other features that was celebrated in this new release is the completely reworked visuals, with every skater and level in the game recreated from the ground up to have a slicker, more modern look, with the versions of the game running on more high-end hardware touting 4K resolution with 60FPS framerate, or a 1080p resolution with 120FPS framerate if players prefer framerate over resolution. This was joined by new highly-detailed character models, more detailed levels, impeccable lighting and shadows, superb reflection effects, and other improvements that made these games look better than ever. Of course, that’s on other platforms. And I suppose that means this is as good a time as any to talk about…

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The Port to Nintendo Switch

Given that one of the most eye-catching features of this remake was the wonderful new graphics, one would be right to be somewhat skeptical about a port of the game to Nintendo Switch. Simply put, there is absolutely no way that the game we saw on other more powerful hardware would be able to make the trip to Nintendo Switch without some severe compromises. It’s just a question of how severe those compromises are, and how much they would affect the gameplay experience.

Well, you can forget about 4K resolution, of course, but this game doesn’t even offer 1080p, nor the 60FPS-120FPS framerates of the original versions. Instead, the Nintendo Switch version of the game runs at a dynamic 900p-720p in docked mode, 540p in handheld mode, with both running at 30FPS, with this framerate dropping noticeably in some places, particularly in some of the more elaborate create-a-park levels (thanks to Nick109’s Direct Comparison video on the game for the numbers). In addition to this, the quality of the visuals has dropped considerably across the board in numerous other areas – level geometry, texture resolution, character detail, lighting and shadows, reflections, aliasing, and even the loading times in this version are longer. Make no mistake, while Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 on other platforms is an absolutely beautiful game, the Nintendo Switch version looks… passable.

Having said that, it is passable. Despite the heavy downgrade, this game is still extremely playable, although the aforementioned framerate drops in create-a-park levels can get pretty nasty. But overall, I found this to be a perfectly acceptable experience considering the game is running on a handheld platform. I will add the caveat that playing this game in two-player split-screen amplifies the game’s graphical flaws considerably, reducing the resolution further and making the game’s problems with aliasing far more severe. Again, it’s still playable, but it’s far from ideal.

Beyond the issues with graphics and performance, the game’s trip to Nintendo Switch seems to be largely without incident. As previously mentioned, the game’s online elements work surprisingly well on Nintendo Switch, and the rest of the game is feature-complete. As far as I can tell, this port doesn’t make use of any unique Nintendo Switch features like motion control or the touchscreen, but that’s probably just as well – this isn’t a series that has a good record of working well with such gimmicks, and it’s probably best that the work on this game was focused on simply ensuring that it was ported mostly intact from other platforms.

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In Conclusion

Prior to the release of the Nintendo Switch version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 and in turn prior to this review, those of you reading this will have undoubtedly heard the other versions of the game celebrated as a return to form for the series, but it was inevitable that in being ported to Nintendo Switch, this game would have to face a severe downgrade in its graphics and performance. Make no mistake, the difference here is stark, and players who have multiple platforms and aren’t extremely interested in portable play should absolutely be looking at one of the other versions of the game.

However, given the limitations of the Nintendo Switch hardware, this is still mostly a pretty good port, still perfectly playable, and it still looks good even if it pales in comparison to last year’s version of the game. And while the gameplay here is a little on the difficult side for the series, overall this is still a solid version of a fantastic game. If you’ve been holding your breath for a worthwhile Switch version of a Tony Hawk game, you can let out a sigh of relief – this game is a welcome return to the series for Nintendo Switch owners. And if you’ve never played a Tony Hawk game before, this is as good a time as any to give the game a try and see what all the hype is about.

tl;dr – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is a superb Compilation and Remake of the first two highly-celebrated games in the Skateboarding series that updates their gameplay and combines them into one whole cohesive experience while retaining what made them so beloved in the first place. The Nintendo Switch version is a severe downgrade in both graphical fidelity and performance from the versions of the game on more powerful hardware, and if you can get one of those versions, I highly recommend it. However, this is still a very playable version of the game and is otherwise intact and feature-complete, including solid online play. If you’ve been waiting for a great Skateboarding game on Nintendo Switch, this is it.

Grade: A-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Best Sports Game – I’ll be honest, this year for sports games on Nintendo Switch it was just Tony Hawk… and everything else. The Hawkman might have had to get a graphical downgrade in transition to Nintendo’s handheld, but this is still a perfectly playable version of a truly great skateboarding game, and the result is the best handheld skateboarding game since Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 Remix on PlayStation Portable in 2005. So if you like Skateboarding games, I think it goes without saying that this one is a must-have.

Runner-Up: Best Compilation/Collection

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2

Genre: Compilation / Sports (Skateboarding)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Split-Screen), 2-4 Competitive (Local Wireless), 2-8 Competitive (Online), Online Content Sharing

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Activision Blizzard

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Review:

The port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 to Nintendo Switch was already highly playable, though pretty graphically compromised, and those compromises aren’t fixed by Nintendo Switch 2. The muddy textures, low-detail character models, aliasing, and overall low resolution are all still present here. And the loading times on Nintendo Switch were already pretty minimal, so if there’s an improvement in that area, I’m not seeing it.

No, the main improvement here is that the framerate has been stabilized. Granted, it’s only been stabilized to the Nintendo Switch version’s max of 30FPS, but that’s still an improvement in a game where you’ll want things as smooth as possible to nail the timing of your tricks. This upgrade is most noticeable in the create-a-park mode, where some parks could get pretty sketchy framerates.

This isn’t a huge improvement on Nintendo Switch 2, but it is an improvement. Tony Hawk fans who already got the game on Nintendo Switch may have been hoping for more, but this is at least something. Of course, if you’re a Tony Hawk fan with a Nintendo Switch 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 is right around the corner, and the Nintendo Switch 2 version of that game will likely be a much bigger graphical and performance upgrade than you could ever hope to expect from this game.

tl;dr – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is a superb Compilation and Remake of the first two highly-celebrated games in the Skateboarding series that updates their gameplay and combines them into one whole cohesive experience while retaining what made them so beloved in the first place. The Nintendo Switch version is a severe downgrade in both graphical fidelity and performance from the versions of the game on more powerful hardware, and playing it on Nintendo Switch 2 brings only modest framerate improvements. This is still a very playable version of the game and is otherwise intact and feature-complete, including solid online play. It’s an acceptable way to play Tony Hawk on Nintendo Switch 2, though players may want to wait for the soon-to-be-released sequel.

Grade: A-

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