Innovative Controls Aren't Everything
Robomodo was selected to develop this addition to the Tony Hawk's Franchise for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
It's very strange not seeing the Neversoft name attached to a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game. After the release of Proving Ground, Activision took a year off to revamp the series. Robomodo tries to take advantage of the big motion control craze by creating a motion controller for Tony Hawk: Ride. The controller looks like a skateboard and is surprisingly sturdy. However, the motion controls are pretty badly setup. The Tony Hawk Franchise for the longest time had been pretty dependent on the many buttons on todays controllers because of the many skating tricks. Tony Hawk: Ride only relies on the new skateboard controller, which relies on your movements. However, because of the limited movements you can make with it, multiple tricks end up being put on the same movement, which gets pretty confusing. The controls are also very slow to respond, which can really make the timing of the tricks very confusing as well.
Another change made is in the gameplay. Because of the new controller, the gameplay has had to be altered to fit with it and what it ends up being is a pretty lackluster and hollow gameplay. You spend most of the game learning tricks you can do on the controller but again with the tough trick setup on the controller, you end up spending way too much time on certain missions trying to do the right tricks. Also, because of this change Ride brings the series back to the multiple level setup and not the one big level setup, which is what the previous games had gotten into.
From a visual standpoint, Tony Hawk: Ride looks fairly decent. It hold a similar resemblance to its competitor Skate. In fact, the camera angle for the game is actually almost in the exact same position as it is in Skate, instead of being in the traditional third-person position that it was in for all the previous Tony Hawk games. To be fair, did do a pretty good job on the level designs. They aren't quite as big as previous games but they pretty well detailed and have an interesting look to them. The character models are pretty good. However, the one thing that thankfully remains the same is the sound. The Tony Hawk Franchise has always been very good with its sound effects and Ride is no different,
Overall, Tony Hawk: Ride is not a bad looking game but the bad motion control setup makes the game too difficult to deal with.
