PSP Version: 3.5/5

The career mode of the PSP version is the same as the PS2 version of this game, which is cool because I remember I tried to play the PS2 version and idk if it was my copy but it was buggy as hell. This version played a lot better.

Anyways, it's good! Nothing will beat the open world of the main version, but I like the challenges here and most of the personality remains in tact. The only major problem is that the physics in this version are kind of sluggish in comparison to the main version.

Also worth noting, this version of the game has a classic mode! And, it's probably the best in the series behind THUG 2! If you're curious about the previous-gen version of Project 8, I'd say play this version just for that alone.

Not simulation-esque enough to be the Skate clone it wants to be, and not over-the-top arcadey enough to be a Tony Hawk game - so it rests in this awkward purgatory of "yeah, it exists I guess". Runs like molasses on the PS3 and is deeply, deeply ugly to look at (like most of these early seventh-generation games the color is just thoroughly sucked clean out of it and character models look like infected meat) but otherwise it's too inoffensive to be anything other than 'mediocre'. The mechanics are fine, the soundtrack is fine (MVPs "The Queen and I", "I Wanna Live", "Devotion ['92]", and "Club Foot"), it's fine. The open world never feels as entertaining, lush, or varied as Tony Hawk's American Wasteland and most of the different areas blend into the background due to their overall dullness. The random-ass difficulty spike is bizarre, and the way it implements Classic Mode in this is truly horrible. But... it plays. The spot challenges are the best new addition, providing hours of content on just a couple curbs. I don't hate it but I also see 100% why the series started to tank after this.

Turns out the PS3/X360 release is sort of a totally different game to the PS2 version I played (and kinda hated) as a kid? Having played a fair chunk of this, and a bit of the PS2 version as well to compare, this version is a lot better... but I don't know if it's actually good.

There are a lot of weird choices made in this game, chief among them is the arbitrary subculture-based restriction of the create-a-skater system. Limiting clothing, body, and other customisation by a skating equivalent of an RPG class system is a massive step down from previous games and limits the kind of creativity you could have in creating your little skater avatar, seemingly for no real reason. I'm not expecting a post-Jackassification THPS game to be a beacon of progressiveness, but it is kinda weird that the character categories that we have are 'punk', 'surfer', 'urban' (uhhhh), 'woman' (gross) and 'kid' (what the fuck).

Speaking of Jackassification, this game is very much trying to shift in tone to be closer to a realistic skateboarding game after the Diet Viva La Bam of THUG2 and the playable Jim Phillips/Raymond Pettibon cartoon that was American Wasteland (for what it's worth, I think the 80's hardcore -inspired style of THAW and the game in general absolutely rules). In hindsight, this reads as a pre-emptive reaction to EA's skate series. The first skate game would come out within a year of Project 8 and would go on to absolutely eat THPS's lunch. After so many years of annual sequel churn from the THPS series, skate felt fresh with its more realistic aesthetic inspired by then-current core skate culture and its analogue stick-flicking control scheme being a closer simulacrum of the mechanics of skateboard than the arcade-y abstraction of the THPS games.

I admire Project 8 for trying something different, but the end result is that extra systems are just piled on top of each other to the point that it weighs down and dilutes the thing that felt so good about THPS, the rapid-fire precision with which you could navigate it's levels.

There's other weird shit here as well. This game features a truly staggering level of product placement (check out your sweet Nokia video phone!), a Skyrim-esque stat levelling system that discourages exploration, and way too much My Name is Earl-era Jason Lee (vastly inferior to Video Days-era x and even Mallrats-era Lee). The skater ranking system feels totally inscrutable and arbitrary as to when and how you progress up the rankings, and it means that completing the punishingly difficult upper tiers of most challenges never really feels worth it. Not being able to fast travel directly to different missions is an obvious choice made to encourage your engagement with the open world, but it's incredibly frustrating when the levels are as unintuitive to navigate as these are. The bail animations feel slower to complete than previous games, and this really punishes you in time-restricted missions like the filmer challenges where bailing feels like it takes even longer somehow. Even something as small as changing the position of the 'restart mission' button on the pause menu from the first option to the second option has a massive impact on the flow of gameplay - at higher levels of play, any friction introduced in quickly restarting a mission just builds frustration more and more.

Worst of all, this has maybe the worst soundtrack in the series thus far. It's not totally devoid of bangers, and they clearly spent a shitload on licensing massive artists for this game. There's great tracks from Nine Inch Nails, Jaylib, Black Mountain, Liquid Liquid, Primus and +44, and absolute classics from Slayer, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Ramones, and Toots and the Maytalls. I'd even wager that Project 8 has more great songs than the PS1 games could even fit onto their discs, but the overall package feels weighed down with filler (I don't need to hear any of Mike Vallely's music ever again), completely bizarre-in-a-bad-way choices, an almost total lack of good hip-hop and a complete lack of character that even the most cringe THPS games had in the soundtrack (THUG2's use of Sinatra, Johnny Cash, and The Doors was fucking inspired). There are loads of big names, but it doesn't feel as curated.

Zoom out from the soundtrack, and that sentiment resonates broadly across this entire game. There is money, talent, and gameplay pedigree here that means this game isn't entirely bad per se, but to quote the game's soundtrack, "it's gone daddy gone, the love is gone".

This is the one that finally delivers on the promise of the "open" Tony Hawk game that they had been nibbling around the edges of since THPS4. Unlike the ridiculous faux-open world of TONY HAWK'S AMERICAN WASTELAND, this does feel like one truly continuous skater heaven that you open new corners of and can freely traverse with relative ease. The familiar NPC-given goals are joined by classic THPS1-3 area-locked, timed sets, as well as a zillion simple, quick, one-trick endurance challenges (grind this long, manual this distance, jump this high etc.) that are marked right on the world for you to stumble upon and try over and over, or just ignore. Everything you do contributes towards the same goal of rising in overall rank in the game's fictional community of skaters, making everything feel immediately rewarding. This level of freedom in gameplay, as well as the huge upgrade to graphics with the new consoles, and the fresh (if occasionally cumbersome) camera perspective lending more immediacy and impact to the skating give this a feeling of newness and evolution that the series hasn't ever had previously.

While this freshness grabbed me immediately and kept me going straight through to the end, the experience does get bogged down in familiar problems like jank and some stupid goals. It does feel somewhat excusable given the amount of content and the ambitious design of the world, but you'd hope they'd have some of this stuff more locked down by now, given that it's, y'know, the eighth one of these.

Even so, the skating still rocks. And like I said, it finally finally hits the spot of a more freeform Hawk adventure, which I, at least, had been eager to see happen.

THPS was kinda wearing out its welcome at this point, but I do kinda dig the structure of the game. The game runs like crud and it can REALLY inhibit gameplay and completing challenges, and the world itself feels like an unimaginative "best-of" cover album of the previous THUG and THAW games (pretty sure each section has a better counterpart in those previous three games), but I really like how the game feels when it's going, it dropped the old engine and used one that emphasizes realism more, and while that can create a bit of dissonance between the cartoonishly Herculean things that are required of certain challenges, I do like it.

This one is a little odd to review, consider the two versions (Xbox/PS2/PSP vs. X360/PS3) are of such different quality.

The short answer; if you want to play this game, get the 6th generation version. The levels aren't really built well for that version (as they are now instanced areas vs. a interconnected open world), but the skating engine is a million times better, and they don't have the awful ragdoll missions.

Ultimately, the game really isn't that good no matter what version you get. You can tell Neversoft (and the various satellite studios porting the titles) were really running out of steam at this point, having pumped out 8 titles in 7 years, not including the the handheld variants. The cracks in the formula really started to show with this entry, though I don't think it really fell apart until Proving Ground.

Project 8 can still be a fun time, but it's definitely not the first game in the series you should be reaching for, or the second, or the third, or the fourth...

Even though this does have "some" sentimental value in terms of my childhood. I could just tell something was off about the game, feeling both completed. And yet broken as all hell. This game had a boring asf story you forget half the time, with one of the worst "customization" of your character ever, where you can pick, ugly white guy, ugly black guy, or handsome black guy. Apart from that like, you couldn't even play as a girl. Doesn't help that it weirdly introduce other skater with mini trailers like it's cool or something. This is a very early 2000s game that honestly is not good to go back to. 100% recommend games like Skate 3 or Proskater 1 & 2 Remake