3/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of Tony Hawk's American Wasteland.

THUG innovated and started the more story-based, cutscene approach of the Tony Hawk games, and did so quite well I might add. THUG2 then immediately shat all over it and destroyed everything the first game had done. What about American Wasteland? This is the last game in the series I played as a kid. Does it bring the series back to the heights of the original THUG, or does it sink the series even deeper into a hole of stupidity? Well, I am glad to say that they took the former approach. This game returns to Underground's more story-based, mission-centered approach and it is all the better for it. Quick retries have returned and searching for where the mission could be is completely gone! The alternative game-play styles are also completely gone for the most part (outside of a few short turret sections and two BMX missions, only one of which is required, and the BMX side-content)! This is a huge improvement over both THUG 1&2, as 99% of this game is PURE skateboarding missions. However, while not as extreme, there are still some themes of destruction and wackiness which do feel out of place with the more serious story. Speaking of the story, let's get into that. The game's story is good, but not amazing. It's not as great as THUG1's as to be expected, but it is still enough to keep you interested as you go along as it stars a ragtag group of misfits trying to build a skatepark, which is a very neat premise. Unfortunately, that premise (the skatepark building part) falls a little flat. You steal pieces for your skatepark throughout the levels in the game (destroy an abandoned theater and get the dinosaur statue on top, rip up the Hollywood Walk of Fame, etc.). This is neat as it gives you a large variety of interesting objects to put in your park, and provides for a lot of neat missions. However, it falls short by not letting you build the park yourself, having all of the pieces pre-placed somewhere and not letting you choose how or where to place them. I feel if this game let you build your own "American Wasteland" park, your way, it would've been a lot more interesting, especially as there is a Create-A-Park suite of tools already in this game (as has been standard for several games). It just really feels like a big missed opportunity, especially as the end result doesn't really have any good lines through the whole thing, and feels more like a bunch of disconnected skating pieces. The narrative itself, as I mentioned, is fine. The characters are likeable and the voice talent is top-notch. Both Cree Summer and Will Friedle voice main characters and hearing their voices together makes the Batman Beyond fan in me super happy. This is a pretty good step up over the first two games as (besides Eric Sparrow) none of the voice-work in those games really stood out. The main campaign of the game itself actually feels oddly short. I know I spent around the same amount of time on this game as I did THUG2, but whereas that game felt like a slog, this one felt like a breezy powerwalk. Maybe if there were a few more things that happened along the way instead of the formula of show up, do missions to get pieces for the skate park, cutscene plays to progress the story. I won't say it felt repetitive as the varied missions felt fun, but I think this structure lead to me feeling like not much was accomplished which could contribute to the game feeling short. Tieing into this, the ending also feels anticlimactic. Due to that feeling of not much being accomplished, when I got to the end I was like "This is the end already? Oh." The ending itself is just okay, but my previous feelings prevented me from getting any sort of satisfaction from watching it. To segue into some of the types of things you'll be doing in story mode, I'll move into talking about the side missions. For the first time ever, they introduce side-missions to the mix. These side-missions reward you with cash, which can be used for clothing or to progress in the story at certain intervals. There are three varieties: tagger missions, BMX missions, and bum missions. Tagger missions involve you going up to the local tagger, Muton, and helping him spray paint a particular area. 95% of these are super easy, only a few of them ever offered any real challenge, and completing most of them are actually required to progress in the game. BMX missions involve Rick Thorne teaching you how the BMX gameplay works. It's just literally a bunch of tutorials. Neat and recommended to do prior to doing the Mat Hoffman mission in the story mode, but ultimately are fairly unnecessary. The bum missions are somewhat interesting. There's a variety of these, but they boil down to the bum asking you to do or hold a particular move, find a few gaps, or get a certain score. These *seem* to be infinite as I spent over an hour doing them and they kept showing up. They're fun, short missions but nothing spectacular. The main problem with this side-content is the reward just isn't that enticing. There's not that large of a selection of clothing in the game for you not to have picked something you liked at the beginning, and the only other time you would do these are the few times when the game requires you to have some money. I wish there was a more enticing reason to do these missions, such as being able to purchase unlockable skaters or maybe stat points. Speaking of stat points, they received a bit of an overhaul this game. In THUG 1&2 stat challenges were seen in the pause menu. Everything you had to do to increase a stat would be listed under that section in the stats menu (even if THUG1 had you wait until a certain portion of the story until you could increase your stat points after you reach certain thresholds). THAW on the other hand instead opts for a different system. To access stat challenges in this game you have to visit a skateshop somewhere in one the various levels. Each skateshop has a certain amount of stat challenges it can give you, meaning after you finish all of the ones at one skateshop, you must wait until progressing to the next level to visit that level's skateshop and access their challenges. The other caveat is that the skateshop only gives you a single random list of challenges per in-game day, meaning you must wait for time to pass after completing each list. This means you must go up to a sign, view the randomly selected list of challenges they give you (each of these challenges increasing a different stat), press the accept button, do that small list of challenges, wait until the next in-game day, and rinse and repeat until you've done all of that shop's challenges. Now, I'm sure you can see the problem. This is a HUGE step back from EVERY previous game where stat management was done in the pause menu. Having it done this way just takes up tons of time and artificially inflates the game's length. Now, there is a sleeping system in the game, but it requires you to find the specific spot in the level where you can sleep, and then repeatedly sleep over and over again until a day passes as the sleeping system only advances you to the next "stage" of a day (the three stages being morning, afternoon, and night). This also bloats the length as you could've just had a the character sleep 24 hours as there are no time-sensitive missions in the game and it would be super easy to do. Something else I should mention is the progression system of this game. In this game, you start out and have a lot less moves. No Cavemans, Manuals, Reverts, Special meter etc. This is because you will learn these moves from other characters as you progress through the game. This is actually a really neat concept and something I really like the idea of. However, the issue is that you gain pretty much every ability within the first chunk of the game, mostly in the first two levels making this progression system feel fairly pointless as you're back to full strength fairly quickly. I would've loved to see this fleshed out more. Maybe go the full first act without a manual, THPS1 style, and then learn it and it opens up all these new combos for you to do. I just think this idea could've been implemented a lot better and it's something I'd like to see revisited in the future. Moving onto more gameplay-oriented things, let's talk about some of the additions this game brings to the table. The major addition to this game that was used in the marketing was the "seamless open-world" you can travel from one end of the map to the other with "no loading screens." I put quotes around those things as it's not entirely accurate. Each level in this game is separated by really long hallways that, while yes aren't traditional sit and wait and do nothing types, are still loading screens nonetheless and nothing new for the industry. This kind of thing was super common (and still is) and while neat and I'll always appreciate not having to sit and wait, it's nothing groundbreaking and it doesn't really make a major difference. The gameplay additions to this game, as you might expect, are mostly useless or overpowered, with the exception of adding a red and green portion to the balance meters so you know which end is the safe one to fall on. Nothing major, but it's a nice quality-of-life feature and I really appreciated it. Rail stalls were introduced, which allow you to stop in place on a grindable surface. This is fairly pointless as it stops your momentum, however it is very good for building up your multiplier if you use trick modifiers, similar to lip tricks. The natas spin move now allows you to perform trick modifiers while doing it. This is incredibly overpowered as you get an INSANE amount of base score super quickly making pretty much any other move redundant. A bert slide move was added which allows you to slide on the ground and leave skid marks. It gives you an okay amount of points, but there are much better ways to get points that don't involve you snaking back and forth on the ground, so this move feels unnecessary, and just not worth doing outside of the few times the game requires it. They also expanded the on-foot gameplay. In this game, you can parkour doing double jump flips, wall runs, and wall flips. This does make the walking gameplay feel better, but honestly walking is really only useful for lining things up better or climbing around to cheese certain missions, so combine that with the low amount of base score the parkour gives you and it feels like yet another hollow addition. The game is also very easy. After the nightmare of THUG2, I thought I'd be safe to leave this game on Normal, especially as I just wanted a bit of a break or an easier time with this one, but man Normal is once again WAY too easy. There were absolutely 0 missions in this game which challenged me in the slightest and that makes me sad. I'll also briefly touch on Classic Mode. It's still a very good addition and seeing these old, classic maps remade is always a treat. Still on the easy side though, but they introduced a Co-op mode which is super fun (but also amplifies how easy the mode is lol). The only other thing I should mention is how the subtitles in this game have weird issues. Most of the time, they don't fully match the spoken dialogue and I've even caught a few times when some spoken lines weren't subtitled at all. I've never come across this in a game and it's just very bizarre. Overall, I'd say this game is an improvement over THUG2, but not quite as good as THUG1. I still did enjoy this game though and I'm glad that it has held up in my memory as at least a pretty fun game. I'm blind in the Tony Hawk series after this. I never played any of the games on the next generation of consoles (aside from a very, very small amount of Project 8, and about 10 minutes of Ride...) and I'm interested to see where it goes from here. I'm hoping for something at least as good as this game. What does this series have in store next?