While everyone is expressing their disappointment with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, I’d like to take a moment to talk about Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, a strange and profoundly divisive game. For me, it evokes a mixed bag of emotions, ranging from disappointment to frustration to pure bliss. It continues the series’ tradition of fast-paced, combo-based skating which I love so dearly, while adding a healthy amount of new features and mechanics that test the player’s abilities in surprising new ways. Some of these new features work exceptionally well, while others hold it back from greatness. Whether Proving Ground deserves any reverence is debatable, considering it is probably the worst entry in the main Tony Hawk games (until THPS5 came along), but I still play it to this day because there’s potential for an amazing product here that is almost met.
For the uninitiated, Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, released in 2007, is the 9th game in the Tony Hawk series. It’s also the last one to be developed by Neversoft, the series’ creators. From what I can tell, Proving Ground was supposed to pick up the slack of American Wasteland and Project 8 by being the first true next-gen Tony Hawk game, sporting a relatively large open world, a greatly expanded character/level creation suite (but not really), a photo/video editor tool, and a host of online features. While some of that ambition shines through, the game is more often than not a glitchy mess full of clunky controls and inconsistent design. This is likely the result of Neversoft growing tired of this increasingly stale annual franchise, as well as having to develop Guitar Hero III at the same time. Also, EA came on to the scene with Skate that same year and pretty much kicked Tony Hawk’s ass into obscurity for the next several years.
To avoid sounding too pessimistic here, I want to clarify that I love the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, and, like I said before, I’m still crazy enough to play and enjoy Proving Ground.
I love/hate this game so much that I recently decided to take on the idiotic task of attempting to almost S-rank it without cheats (I say “almost” because the game has three online achievements and I don’t have a gold XBL account to get them. Also, I’m probably the only person on earth still playing this game). This is no easy task, as Proving Ground is, without a shadow of a doubt, the hardest Tony Hawk game ever. Proving Ground lives up to its title, testing players’ abilities to perform tons of lengthy and awkward combos that are sure to throw off your balance meters. According to TrueAchievements.com, a site that adjusts the score of Xbox achievements based on how many registered users have obtained them, this is one of the very few Xbox 360 games to have a TrueAchievements score of over 5,000 points.
The experience has simultaneously been a frustrating nightmare and the most fun I’ve had with a Tony Hawk game in a long time. Taking on Proving Ground’s most grueling missions reveals this game’s severe lack of polish, but it’s also opened my eyes to some of its more genius and ambitious elements, especially with regard to the design of its challenges and the variety of solutions players can use to beat said challenges.
Using the word “genius” to describe this game feels strange because none of those genius design elements can be seen at first, second, or even third glance. On it’s surface, Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground is a boring entry in a once groundbreaking series that rehashes the pseudo-realistic story from Tony Hawk’s Underground, the mechanics from Tony Hawk’s Project 8, and makes little to no effort to move the series forward in any meaningful ways. In fact, it even takes a few steps backwards.
Perhaps the most prominent of these backwards design choices is the limited customization options. Customization is one of the cornerstones throughout the THPS series, but for some odd reason it’s severely lacking here. The whacky character creation of past games is ditched in order to serve Proving Ground’s more realistic storytelling, meaning you can only create generic hipster-looking dudes (seriously, no lady skaters here) and skate them around generic representations of Philly, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. The create-a-park feature is also limited to a single “Skate Lounge” where you can only place a few simple ramps and rails throughout with almost no control over the basic geometry of the level. The game tries to make up for this by letting you place custom pieces throughout the actual game world via a “rigger” menu, but even this is limited to only 30 pieces. Sure, the game world itself is already pretty well crafted, albeit a little bland in the graphics department, but it would be nice to have more creative options.
The game somehow redeems itself despite this, because what the rigger menu lacks in customizability it makes up for in clever experimentation. The real genius behind the rigging mechanic is the many ways it can be used to help you complete almost all the goals throughout the game. You can build an assortment of ramps if you want to cover a great height or distance, you can put down a few rails to help build some momentum up to those ramps, or you can build a makeshift funbox or half pipe that you can use to help build up a combo for score-based challenges. Even in the game’s Classic Mode goals you can place custom pieces wherever you want on the fly: build a boost-powered kicker ramp to reach the secret disk or a series of rails to get through the SKATE letters a little faster.
Experimentation is also emphasized in the massive repertoire of tricks players have at their disposal. THPG is the culmination of almost all the functionality you’ve had in previous games: reverts, spine transfers, off-board walking and climbing, grind stalls, Nail-The-Trick, etc., while adding a few new tricks to the book. Some of these additions, particularly the Aggro Kick/Push and the extended Nail-The-Trick suite, will prove invaluable throughout your skateboarding journey. There are plenty of times where you’ll have to trigger Nail-The Trick to cover a little extra distance or push off a wall during a manual to get a little extra speed.
Of course, having such a large arsenal of tricks has its share of problems. There are cases where multiple tricks/abilities are bound to a single button, so you might end up doing an acid drop when you meant to stall on a rail, for instance. It’s hard to describe specific examples if you haven’t played the game, so just imagine it’s like old school Castlevania when you try to use your sub-weapon when you’re near a flight of stairs.
Proving Ground really gives you too many tools and tricks, but despite the control issues that come with such an abundance, the game’s challenges actually encourage you to utilize a large majority of those tools in exciting and convoluted ways. Completing goals at Sick level requires you to figure out where to use specific mechanics and where to place certain rigger pieces, and then you have to combine that ingenuity with the button-mashing combo skills from the series’ past. It’s also worth noting that none of this weird use of level editing and trick mechanics feels like cheating or exploitation. As has been established already, the challenges are all really hard, so it’s likely that Neversoft left some leeway for players and allowed for multiple solutions for the game’s challenges. This design is so rewarding because it encourages players to think outside the box. Dare I say this is the thinking man’s Tony Hawk game.
Like Project 8 before it, Proving Ground’s gameplay structure also makes an admirable attempt to meet the ambition set forth by Aggressive Inline, another criminally underappreciated extreme sports game. Like Aggressive Inline, Proving Ground has a bunch of ambient challenges that you can trigger by just skating around. Trick off a specific marker and you can start a mission that has you grinding on a sequence of highlighted objects in a protracted combo, or that tests your ability to balance a manual from one end of a building to another, among other tasks. Admittedly, these little diversions are pretty insubstantial in the grand scheme of the main story mode, but they really highlight the satisfaction of stringing a bunch of tricks together in a combo.
Proving Ground also borrows Aggressive Inline’s stat progression system: you improve your stats simply by practicing them. For instance, the more time you spend in the air, the more your Air stat will increase. These Aggressive Inline-inspired mechanics minimizes the use of menus and timers so that fewer annoyances will interrupt the flow of your skating. I can’t stress enough the importance of flow in games like this that emphasize exploration and trial-and-error tasks, and both Proving Ground and Aggressive Inline get it right.
Proving Ground doesn’t fully commit to the Aggressive Inline design, however. In the vein of Pro Skater 4 onward, you initiate most challenges by talking to a person and performing a specific objective in a confined space. Of course, there’s still plenty of freedom in figuring out how to achieve that objective, thanks to the aforementioned rigger mechanic and all the unique tricks at your disposal. It’s similar to the brief park creation goals in Aggressive Inline which also rely on an efficient placement of ramps and rails. Again, both games nail the freedom and experimentation aspects of the extreme sports genre.
I could ramble on about this game forever (and I already have for 1500+ words), although I know my ramblings will mostly fall on deaf ears. I understand this is one of the most forgotten entries in the series, but I truly believe it deserves more attention for the innovations it tried to pull off. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 may have left a sour taste in your mouth, but if you’re still looking for a new-ish Tony Hawk game that isn’t just banking on nostalgia, consider giving Proving Ground a shot--if you have the patience to look past its most egregious faults, that is.
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