Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

The whole big deal with Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland is that all of LA is laid out for you to own. On Xbox 360, the fact you can see so far, and so clearly, makes your urban assault that much more awesome.

Platform:
Xbox 360
Release Date:
2 December 2005
Publisher:
Activision
Genre:
Sports

In addition to the new tricks and perhaps the coolest scenario in the series, it’s back to basics for Hawk’s fans in THAW, but above all you’ll really want to take your skills online with Xbox 360. Story Mode casts you in the role of a wannabe pro, down on his luck but earning respect by learning new tricks. It seems to favour Hawk’s newbies, restricting moves until you’ve officially learned them. Seasoned pros should breeze through the challenges, then, but it’s worth it to free-roam around LA and to unlock more extras.

Previous Hawk’s games keep you penned inside areas, but in THAW the idea is to keep on skating, extending your combos to ridiculous proportions. Although, strictly speaking, you’re not able to skate, say, all the way from Santa Monica to the Sunset Strip (sometimes you need to hop on a bus for example), you’ve much more freedom.

Classic mode is the more likely off-line hang out for experts, up against the clock to meet objectives. This year Classic mode takes on a ‘best of’ feel, with levels taken from way back in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series, plus a couple of areas from the recent PSP version. You can play everything co-op too, collecting the SKATE letters in record time!

Like we said though, THAW is strongest on Xbox Live via Xbox 360. It takes full advantage of all the new Live functions such as ‘achievements’, whereby players can examine every little detail of other players’ performance and try to match or beat it. As a launch game for Xbox 360 we can’t think of a more thorough trial by fire for the console’s new online services. In addition there are the standard online modes, common to PS2 and Xbox, which include Capture the Flag, Graffiti, and King of the Hill.

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SCREENSHOTS

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REVIEWS

A solid start for the Birdman on the new Xbox, which makes up for a lack of outstandingly original offline features with huge appeal on Xbox Live. It seems that Activision and Neversoft are pushing the multi-player thrills this year, recognising the strong competitive elements and the desire to just skate and skate without limit.