A port of Tony Hawk's Underground 2
Tony Hawk's Underground 2 is based on the console game of the same name. Like the previous GBA releases of the series, it's an isometric representation of the console levels combined with polygonal characters. It contains both a story mode, in which you create a rookie skater and take him or her on a world tour with pros to improve their skills and win prizes; and a classic mode, in which you must accomplish various goals such as tricking off objects or getting a high score within two minutes. Changes in this iteration include removing the timer from most goals in story mode, allowing you to have several active at once and new moves like the nata spin, tantrum, which allows you to recover from a bail without losing everything, focus, where you can slow time in order to land the best trick and sticker-slapping.
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Sure we weren't going to get the big crazy stunts cause the GBA can't handle all that but surely it could still deliver the fun gameplay that the earlier entries had brought us right?
Not this time I'm afraid cause oh mamma, this GBA port is total trash.
The gameplay itself is fine, it's the usual GBA Hawk gameplay as always with the isometric perspective and there's some fun bits here and there. It's everything else that lets this down badly.
The levels just seem so barren and dull unlike the main console version making it less fun to traverse and the frame rate is abhorrent. This thing just cannot seem to run properly constantly speeding up and slowing down all the time which is un-bloody-acceptable considering how well the other games ran on the GBA.
But what kicks this down a peg is the fucking terrible minigames that you're forced into at sections of the game. One of them isn't too bad but the other one is dull timewasting nonsense and special mention goes to the turret minigame as it fucking sucks.
It's just the same thing over and over again where the people never change, the background never changes even when you're in a new area and it just keeps on going and going and going and you're just sat there thinking "Can I get back to oh I don't know... actually playing a fucking skateboarding game please?". This crappy little minigame just drags this entire experience down.
The licensed music may be cool to hear but when there's only a couple of heavily cut-down tracks and they all sound like garbled bit-crushed crap, you'll quickly be reaching for the Off volume in seconds. And what is up with our characters this time? They look so weird and off with their big hands and big feet.
This is easily the most phoned in Tony Hawk GBA game (aside from American Sk8land) and it's such a darn shame because Vicarious Visions made some great quality GBA ports of the other Hawk titles before but I guess their heart just wasn't in this one. Sadly Underground 2 is where the GBA honeymoon ends and the quality just nosedives - long before the series itself truly starts to bail in quality too.