Tony Hawk American Wasteland 360
Xbox 360
Neversoft/Activision





'Tony Hawk's American Wasteland' was a really good addition to the Tony Hawk stable. It provided a neat story, some excellent presentation and a return to the skating goodness that the Hawk games have been renowned for, but seemed to be lacking in the 'Underground' series. For example, 'THAW' removed the clumsy vehicles found in 'Tony Hawk's Underground' (aka 'THUG') 1 and 2 and replaced them with the BMX as an optional mode of transport rather than requiring it to be utilised in any given mission. 'THAW' put the emphasis back onto skating, but still retained the fun parts of 'THUG' - most notably the opening up of levels through demolition. Enter the Xbox 360, and 'THAW' is released as a launch title. Unfortunately, it's a straight port of the Xbox version. There are a few minor alterations and some control reconfiguration, but in terms of content the game is identical.

The graphics do look a little cleaner and higher resolution, and the models and animation looks more refined: a good thing, as sometimes the Xbox version looked a little too blocky and jumpy. Unfortunately there's some noticeable side effects of porting the Xbox's low resolution textures into the game. For example, the sky flashes to a lighter colour when the camera is at a certain angle and sometimes the light shafts from a lamp will suddenly go a solid white. Also, the glow around items often appears very low resolution, whilst the surrounding background looks good, creating really ugly looking on-screen artefacts. Whilst the colours of the game appear brighter overall, when you get close to a wall, sign or other textured object things can look downright ugly.

With the redesigned Xbox 360 controller, the black and white button functionality has been replaced by the top shoulder buttons, and this makes it much easier to pull off tricks such as wall runs, caveman, and so forth. If anything, the controller feels far more responsive: tricks I had a bit of trouble pulling off in the original version seem a lot easier now. Even in the classic modes I was getting much more air and reaching the special bonuses.

However, apart from those minor things, this game is exactly the same as the Xbox version. The story, the tricks, the game modes and music are all pretty much identical, and the graphical improvements are so minor that it is all but unnoticeable. Look at the two versions side by side on a normal television and you would be hard pressed to tell which is which. Furthermore, I had crashes that did not occur on the Xbox version. It seemed to be random, but occurred most often when I hit the start button to pull up the menus, such as the messages and the save menu. This did not endear the game to me either.

I would love to talk about the online functionality, but unfortunately every time I hit "connect" I couldn't get a game. I suspect most people are over playing this game online, just as I was when it was out on Xbox.

Julian Cram