This shit is a bad day cure right here. I replay this like every other month and never get tired of it.

I owe this game a lot of who I am and what I like currently and I still love the absolute shit out of this game.

Obviously it's not nearly this perfect game but I love this game even for it's weird ass decisions and all. Gimme more shitty gimmick levels i fucking love picking up girls in a planter truck and having to do 50k combo to get them to come to my party.

I just really love the personality of this game and personally I think it's the height of the series gameplay. This game also makes me appreciate absolute dickhead villains with no redemption and the satisfaction of shutting them up s/o Eric Sparrow.

You can say whatever you want about summer. Sure, it's hot as hell and you can't stay under the sun for more than 2 minutes before you get disintegrated, but it's the season of the year I always liked the most. There's something liberating about it, especially in your young teenage years, when you can spend most of the time doing whatever you want. This time will eventually pass as the time goes on and as you get older, but you'll inevitably look back at it at some point and say "man, those really were the days". There's this saying about how you never appreciate something until you no longer have it, and as much as you really think to yourself that you have enjoyed those past moments, there will always be something that you wish you could have done back then, but still, you smile as you wander through Memory Lane.

Anyways, now to the actual game. It was AWESOME! I really didn't have any standards cause I never played any Tony Hawk game until now, the only reference I had were some people on the Internet who claimed these were great games. Even while looking for 2nd hand copies, one guy's ad had in the description: "an excellent game to include in your collection, a timeless classic". So color me surprised when I got to play and it turned out to be a great game. Despite having Tony Hawk's name on the cover, you don't play as him or other skaters (unless you go on free play), but yourself, or whoever you want really. The story starts simple, you're some New Jersey guy that skates with his friend, but one day, you decide to go pro, so the story is basically that, mixed with some twist throughout. But as simple as it is, I got to give credit to the writers for giving out one of the most memorable villains in video game history, the backstabbing jerk himself, Eric Sparrow. You really gotta play the game to get what I'm saying, but my god did the writers do their work well, because I hated that guy!

You'll go from chapter to chapter clearing objectives on the levels you're put in, places like New Jersey, Manhattan, Hawaii, Vancouver, even Moscow with frickin' soviet-era tanks that you can (of course) grind on. The objectives are stuff like "do a combo" or "do these tricks", and while that sounds quite simple and probably a bit boring, their work is to make the player use all the mechanical knowledge they've gained so far and put it to test, so everytime you stumble upon a objective you have already done before, it's going to be more challenging plus the change of location, so it rarely feels samey. An odd addition this game has is driveable vehicles. Every level has its own car, and while it certainly isn't one of THUG's greatest mechanics, due to a floaty driving and high speeds, it is entirely optional except for one or two objectives for each level, so it's not that bad after all. For the rest of the objectives, each one serves their purpose as you get to show off your skateboarding skills. Grinds, manuals and flip-tricks are what you're going to be doing all the game, but it's not just about performing those tricks, it's about chaining them into long and sick combos. You know, grinding a bench, then a manual to a ramp, a jump and a flip-trick, and a finishing special move or whatever to try and achieve a high score. To do this, you'll need to explore each level so you can find gaps, jumps, ramps or any surface to grind on, to then execute the wildest combo known to mankind.

This game's exploration isn't about finding items or power-ups to help you skate. Seriously, this game is hard as fuck to master and isn't handholding by any means. But rather about finding new spots to skate. Each level has their own gaps, these are spots to jump over, across or whatever, things like spines or transfers that can give you more points as well as combo multipliers. You'll stumble upon some of them entirely by accident, but I guarantee you that the best spots are really hidden and you got to walk your ass through the levels to find them. And boy is it cathartic when you pull off the wildest combo you've never imagined. The level design helps a lot too, since everything needs to be interconnected to keep the combo momentum, you can skate on basically anything you want. You can even hold on to passing cars on the streets to boost yourself. I'm not kidding when I say that literally at the start of the game you need to hold on to a gang car to jump over an entire bridge with the skate (quick side note here: this game has one of the wildest openings I've seen for a game about skateboarding). There's a lot of trial and error, but I mean, what would you expect from a game about skateboarding. It's not unfair tho, because when something doesn't work is mostly due to slow reflexes and not fault of the game. The final battle of the game can go fuck itself though. This game shines the most when you're left to roam free the levels and find gaps. This is not something to do only because of how great it feels to skate, because as you're your own character and not some skater with default stats, you need to perform some objectives like a 100.000 points combo or chaining three or four manuals in a single combo among other things to improve the skating statistics, so by the end of the game, if you don't suck like me, you'll be able to do a lot of stuff you couldn't even imagine you'd be doing at the start of the game. It's a really rewarding game, and even if you get mad at some points (which will eventually happen), the character will get back up and continue experimenting with the gameplay mechanics.

Ok, I think I'm going to wrap this up, but before going, I want to mention an aspect of this game that I rarely, if not never, see mentioned in any other reviews online. The thing that ties up the experience for me. And it is the fact that it's always a good day. It's always sunny, with a blue sky and a bit cloudy, the grass is really green, everybody's skating and having a good time, and the radio has non-stop bangers! Non-professional skateboarding rebel nature, the hip-hop, punk and rock that play on the radio and the ability to skate basically anywhere, are all combined together to give away a feeling of freedom that's really close to the human spirit. A feeling of freedom inherited from games like OutRun that I rarely see represented nowadays and even back then. Thanks to the teenage-like music, its precious environments and levels, the crazy story about rising to the top and the awesome arcade-like gameplay, THUG manages to picture not just a great day from your teenage years, but the idealized representation of the best moments of your life from when you were young. Even if you didn't do skateboarding (I surely didn't), the feeling this game gives is something so universal that it can resonate with a lot of people, if not basically everyone. What Tony Hawk's Underground makes me feel is, to put it simply, the best summer I've never had.

After settling a long-standing account by finally forcing myself to get to the end of THPS4, that game's mediocrity caused me to - in a moment of profound short-sightedness - declare the new no-time-limit open-exploration direction for the series to be a mistake. This sequel proved me wrong immediately.

Unbelievably, the most crucial new factor that lifts THUG out of the stagnacy and confusion of THPS4 is the story mode! A story with characters, in Tony Hawk! And it's kinda good! (For what it is.) Any actual details about the plot aside, having a throughline and a momentum and character growth tying each of the levels together elevates the single-player a lot more than I would have guessed. The actual stuff you end up doing on each level is still varied, goofy, sometimes easy, and sometimes early-2000s gross, but its so, so crucial to not just be wandering around checking things off a list for no reason at all.

I may be off-base though - caught up in the surprise of enjoying the story mode. The actual reason this game is so much better may just be the massively, massively improved level design. Literally every one of these levels is better than every one of THPS4's, and I think many could hang with the greats from 2 and 3. They're so good, even some of the total bullshit challenges you get won't bother you as much having to restart them a million times because now the lines just make a lot more sense.

There's still more jank than I would like, and the story, character creator, and a couple of the mechanics overreach a bit or break the game some, but I am genuinely impressed overall.

(Less impressed with fucking Gene Simmons and KISS music being in it. I'll never forget where I was that magical moment that I booted this up for the first time, started the story, and as I began digging into the character creator, heard the opening strains of a new classic THPS tune blasting out from my character's room's broken down speakers - an orchestra-accompanied live recording of "Rock and Roll All Nite" from 2003)

This quite easily the Tony Hawk series at it's peak.

Neversoft made a masterpiece with Underground by taking every single thing they have developed and experimented with over the years and combining it into one package filled to the brim with stuff to encounter and do.
Adding stuff like getting off your board is such a great addition that honestly, it should've been a thing since the first game because of how useful the ability to reposition yourself exactly the way you want in a game like this is.

The stages are, Incredible. The design, the possibilities for combos, every little thing is so well crafted you can end up doing a combo from the same starting point in like 50 million ways, it's a treat getting lost in these amazing maps based off of different American states and custom made skate parks or you can even build your own (which I never bothered with but hey someone will prob find that stuff addicting).

Not to even mention the other new stuff like the custom character custom boards and all which are just the cherry on top of this cake.

The missions are honestly the weakest part mostly because they can sometimes limit the stuff you can do in a game all about chaining combos in different ways but they can be fun in their own way.
I hope Eric Sparrow dies with a board up his ass.

Final Rating:
8-9 /10

Further iteration upon the Pro Skater series, this installment adds more tricks, more ways to continue your ever increasing combo multiplier going, and with an actual story to boot!

You play as a kid from New Jersey (If you're like me, you made this kid look like a freak with the unchained character creator) just wanting to make it big with his "friend" Eric Sparrow

Betrayals, setbacks, being stranded in other countries outside of his home countrie's jurisdiction follow as you shred across so many different and distinct skate parks disguised as real places in the world!

So much to find, so much to unlock, and the skill ceiling for how far you can push the combo and how many ridiculous skate moves you can pull is up to the clouds!

And of course a sick collection of hip hop/punk/thrash metal/and good ole rock n roll blasts as you take over the skating world!

Oh this was a blast from the past and it really held up in 2020. You immediately notice how much of a time capsule for early 2000s punk culture it is, but it's never as obnoxious about it. The story is fun, and unlike games later in the series the tone of it comes off as funny and endearing. What really stands up though is creativity on display: some of the best laid out levels and most fun level tasks in the series history come from THUG. And controls were solidified and perfected by this point in series history, so campaign works really well as introduction to high level Tony Hawk gameplay gradually introducing new tricks and ramping up the complexity of tasks. This was one of my favorite never finished childhood games and I'm glad I was finally able to complete it and had heck of a good time doing so.