Tony Hawk's American Wasteland (XBox)

This game is the 7th Tony Hawk game and I loved it. Almost everything about this game was a new feature for the Tony Hawk series. You choose your character and you can go to stores and buy new clothes, haircuts and accessories which you buy from earning money from the homeless who give challenges to complete. This game also gives you more moves on the skateboard like my personal favorite, the Burt Slide. You also get the board whack that allows you to beat people with your skateboard and you can even throw it at them which serves no purpose to the game but is still tonnes of fun. The graphics in this game are also pretty good for the Xbox and the controls are easy to follow for someone who usually plays games. You also get to create your own graffiti to spray everywhere from the tagger from Underground 2. Another new feature for this game is that you get to ride a BMX bike and learn new tricks for it which I rather than a skateboard. The only bad thing about this game is that once you complete the story, there is nothing more to do except start a new game because once you get all the Skate park pieces and complete the story, there is nothing more to do. This is a very good game and I highly suggest that anyone buys it

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland is the 7th Tony Hawk skating game to be created, and it has changed a lot since the first, but has it really changed enough to make it a new game?

The great thing about the game is the new feature of seamless skating, whereby there are no loading times between each part of the city, so there's no waiting for the game to move from level to level anymore. This is carried out rather well, although as it shifts from level to level, the picture can jitter a little, and it shows what it's doing.

The game engine is starting to get old, as throughout the game you can see the cracks of the ancient Xbox hardware. First off, the graphics are looking sharp round the edges, and clipping also becomes a big problem within the game, although the worst culprit for game errors and bugs are the Bink cut scenes (Bink Video is the method of making cutscenes that render on the spot, instead of being a straight video (e.g. a movie on a DVD) so it works in-game). I've had the game send random messages up, like if I've finished a certain task, and the game loads a cut-scene, it throws up a "Try Again" message before advancing on with the next task. Another problem is that things are loaded for the cutscenes, so you get people appearing from nowhere and items changing position. To the average gamer this looks pretty strange, and it can make the game look rugged round the edges.

The soundtrack is possibly one of the better ideas in the game. They've taken the usual sample of rock, punk and metal tracks from bands like Green Day, Motley Crew, and Mastodon for you to skate along to, but have also got other bands like Thursday and My Chemical Romance to cover and record an old punk song, for example My Chemical Romance covered a song called Astro Zombies, originally by The Misfits. This is a good idea, and also adds more old school punk songs to the mix.

Despite it's bugs and problems, the game is very addictive, and if you can overlook it's flaws it is a great game to play, despite being on the short side. As well as the story mode, there is a classic mode, which is alike to the early Tony Hawk games where you have two minutes to score points, get the SKATE letters, get the "Hidden Tape", and other goals. They have also added a 2 player co-op function so that 2 players can play the classic mode at once.

For THAW, Neversoft have included the use of Xbox Live, so you can play the game online against other skaters, whether it be to get the highest scores or combo's, or even Capture the Flag. This is a good addition to the already packed game.

Overall, this is a great game, despite it showing that the Xbox really is getting to the end of it's technology life, with cracks in the graphics and the game engine. If you've played all of the other Tony Hawk games, I would suggest a rental of this first, because it may not be good enough to justify you paying another £30 for this game. For anyone else, this is a great game, and shouldn't be overlooked.