3.5/5 ★ – Chunderclap's review of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3.

Good: All together, the controls felt fairly competent, and gameplay as a whole was fluid and engaging, and forming and executing lines always felt rewarding and unique. The game did rails and lips really well, and the snapping always felt fair and realistic, without punishing extremely slight imperfections. The inputs for different tricks also felt forgiving yet precise, allowing for unique tricks to be planned and executed often times without misreadings of the inputs. While the button inputs, as opposed to the right stick trick controls of the skate series, felt strange at first, I think it allowed for more precise and repeatable tricks and combos, even if it felt less satisfying to land at times. The music was awesome, every song on the soundtrack was incredible, especially in the context of a skate boarding game. With two main exceptions, I felt like all the stages were really well designed, with each being unique and three dimensional, while rewarding creativity and exploration with small easter eggs, stage interactions, and more. The stage goals were all really well done, fit well with the stages, and engaging and fair, with a few notable exceptions. The two player experience was awesome, with each map feeling like it offered unique areas for gamemodes like slap, trick attack, graffiti and king of the hill all feeling unique from map to map. Bad: While the controls for tricks were pretty well done, the awful controls for traversal, coupled with the issue of perpetual motion in which hitting a wall instantly shoots you in the other direction made setting up and repeating certain tricks and stage goals a painful experience. The lack of a walking, or any way to control your movement on a finer level made certain levels, namely the cruise ship level, a miserable experience. While lips and rails were highpoints, from a control point of view, pools and halfpipes were incredibly disappointing. Despite a satisfying ability to link flip tricks, lips and grabs, the incredibly random feeling range of landings, often labeled as simply “landed sideways” drags down what could be an incredibly part of the game. In addition, the controls for getting out of half pipes was incredibly inconsistent, and often times despite holding up and out of the pipe, I would just continue to sail in the air, coming back in once again. Two main stages I felt were poorly designed, though for starkly different reasons. Tokyo, which was a competition, I felt was very underwhelming compared to other stages, though primarily due to a poor set up that feels like a lot of features were wasted space, and the stage as a whole was lacking of good runs, leaving you with almost two distinct stages within one, the pools on the far side, and the bento box, quarter pipe to rail side you start on, with no incentive or reward for blending the whole stage into one massive run. The next stage, cruise ship, was a disaster of a stage, primarily due to the tight spaces, abundance of water and pedestrians, and the piss poor controls for navigating areas packed with hazards. Cruise ship was perhaps the primary example, though there were others (such as the foundry secret tape) where I felt like this game could have benefited from either a Skate like moveable checkpoint placement system, or an ability to get off your board and walk. While I did enjoy most of the two player modes, I do think that graffiti could’ve benefitted from slightly smaller maps, perhaps subsections of maps that you could choose. Primarily I felt like this was because there was little incentive to be doing tricks in the same area, and often times myself and the other player would just find our own area and do near zero point tricks on as many obstacles as we could, completely negating (or at least failing to really incentivize or force) half of the graffiti gameplay mechanics. The competition stages, while 2/3 on good stage design, suffered from the most horrendous, arbitrary and random scoring ever. I had multiple attempts on Tokyo where I, with only 2 bailouts total, scored over 100,000 points, gathering an 85 score. I would then have another run where, again with 2 bailouts, and only 91,000 points, scoring an 88. There was literally no pattern or reasoning behind the actual scores, despite what the rules claim. Additionally, the opponents scoring were clearly weighted to be higher when you score higher, and lower when you score lower. I tried for multiple hours before I ever scored in the 80s on a single run. In all those hours, no opponent ever scored over 86. The first time I averaged 83, which would have been easily 3rd place in all my previous attempts, 7 people scored over 86, and 3 averaged over 90, which I had never seen. The goal post was constantly being moved, which would not have been as big a problem had the scoring been somewhat predictable or understandable. Overall (7/10): While THPS 3 is a fun ps2 title, with awesome multiplayer, overwhelmingly solid level design that often rewarded creativity, and a killer soundtrack, it suffered from some really low points in stage and stage goal design, made all the lower by poor traversal controls and inconsistent aerial controls.