Alongside the Birdman himself and skateboarding mainstays like Andrew Reynolds and Chris Cole, there's a nice selection of young up-and-comers who could very well become your new favorites. If there's any redeeming quality to be found in THPS5, it's the skaters themselves. There's no way to successfully complete a mission early even after you've met your objective, and the static map screen offers nothing in the way of guidance. In THPS5, starting over takes at least seven seconds: you're forced to wait through two lovely countdown timers, and the Retry command is placed as the fourth option down on the pause menu. In previous Hawk games, the sting of difficult mission objectives was lessened by the fact that you could retry it instantaneously. The rest are inane chores, like knocking giant beach balls out of a pool or shooing pigeons off a railing aceing these activities only leads to more misery when you unlock the 'PRO' missions, which are the antithesis of fun. Other points-based tasks will often deprive you of crucial moves like manuals and reverts in a futile attempt to make things more interesting.

Meanwhile, the missions are effectively the same in every level, with the classic two-minute score run being the only mildly enjoyable objective to choose from. Once you start to play in earnest, you'll discover the lead paint in this bootleg toy: crippling online connectivity. But no, the letdowns are only just beginning. There's also the new slam move, a downward plunge which feels unnecessary at best and will often ruin your combos at worst. Maybe you're getting bad vibes from the inexplicable addition to the unadjustable control scheme, which lets you push forward with the right trigger and slow to a stop with the left trigger as if your skater was a bipedal car (thankfully, movement with the D-Pad still functions just fine). Perhaps you're just thrown off by the half-baked cel-shading effects on the skaters, you think to yourself anyone would be taken aback by dead-eyed models who appear to be refugees from the previous console generation.

The basic framework is the same as its predecessors: you skate around sizable levels, comboing tricks and completing a variety of missions. THPS5 looks familiar, but you know something is definitely off about it.

Tony hawk pro skater 5 ps4 review