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.