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

This game is incredibly important. It laid the groundwork for the future of the Tony Hawk gaming franchise and for that, I am incredibly thankful. But BOY OH BOY, I don't really care for this game in particular. Now I started playing Tony Hawk games with Underground and going back to this took more than a little getting used to. No manuals, reverts, camera control, etc. made this quite hard to string combos together. I eventually overcame this and was able to beat the game without *too* much trouble, but it was difficult. Maybe it's because I was never amazing at Tony Hawk games or maybe it's because this game is just hard, but man I had difficulty continuing at times, mostly so in the competitions. These require you to get a high score and not bail as much as possible as that detracts from your score. Just placing isn't hard, but if you want to go for gold (and come on, who wouldn't) you'll be in for a world of hurt. These could take me 50 tries each to get gold in. It's not necessary as I said before, as placing isn't too hard, but I just didn't feel like I beat it until I got gold. Aside from that, the major issue with this game is a lack of explanations or tutorials. Now, maybe this is my fault as I don't have the manual, but nothing in this game is explained. I had *some* knowledge of how the controls work due to playing later entries in the franchise, but stuff like special moves, fastplants, etc. were completely foreign to me and I had to look them up (something that is absolutely needed if you want to be able to easily beat the score challenges and get gold in competitions). But as I said before, the foundation is there! This is what all future Tony Hawk games are built off of and it does have some stellar maps which get remade time and time again in the future games of the series just due to how iconic and well designed they are. All in all though, I would probably never go back to this game. It's way too frustrating for me, so thank God it's getting remade this year.