Featureless, broken, and ugly, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is unacceptable as a full retail release in 2015. Though the controls from legacy THPS games are intact - ollie, flip tricks, grab tricks, grinds – there’s no indication of effort by the developer to evolve gameplay into anything deserving of the horsepower or social gaming integration of current-gen consoles. Larger, more detailed levels; drastically improved graphics; a better, more integrated community or online experience; any kind of customizable skater options: these components together could have made Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 playable, even enjoyable. As is, this hot mess is impossible to recommend at even a fraction of its full retail price.
THPS5 doesn’t just fall short of what made the original THPS games great, but its muddy textures and sad, soulless graphics wouldn’t measure up as an Xbox 360 or PS3 release in the previous console generation. Even with a day-one patch weighing in at over seven GB, the game is rife with glitches that will test your patience to its limits: during my time with it the game froze during the tutorial to the point I had to restart it, and as often as not the interactive starting points for any events in a level wouldn’t work, and the restart was necessary again. This required sitting all the way through the intro cinematics for Activision, Robomodo, and Disruptive Games, which served as a reminder of who is to blame for this absolute garbage.
Each of the game’s eight levels serves as a sort of online lobby in which your skater can interact with other players, but not in a way that adds to gameplay or events. They’re skating, you’re skating, you can hit them and they can hit you. That’s it. The myriad ways in which these lobbies could have been incorporated into gameplay and weren’t just show the lackluster effort put into the actual development of THPS5. Events in each level are started at interactive points throughout each level. But at each start and end of the event, the game kicks you to a loading screen before rendering the event within the same level. Once the event is completed, you are taken back to the same loading screen after an awkward few seconds waiting for anything to happen. This is inexcusable with the kind of processing power on hand, especially for the tiny levels and laughable graphics of THPS5.
Thankfully this game was a rental for me and set me back just over $6 – a 90% discount from its retail asking price. Had I spent the full price to get this game home and see what it was, I would have been justifiably furious. As free-to-play or with a low entry price of $10 or $15 with extra skaters or levels available as paid DLC: maybe acceptable. What’s on offer? Absolutely not.
There are a lot of ways Robomoto could have made a decent, fun THPS game: better interaction with other players through the level lobbies, more skaters to choose from or any kind of create-a-skater option - expansion of what’s on offer in basically any direction is so easy to imagine - but the developers failed to put any creativity, let alone execution, into what’s deservedly rotting on a retail shelf near you. Hard pass, THPS5. For. Fucking. Shame.