Tony Hawk's Proving Ground Review

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But worse is the damned photography. Constantly, challenges require you to take a snap of yourself in the middle of a trick, halfway over a gap, or on an extensive grind. Either these cameras are set up by the game, or occasionally you must place your own, and fiddle with them to arrange the ideal shot. But here's the thing: to take a picture, you have to click the right stick. You just try that when you're trying to trick your grind, balance it, and prepare to ollie to the oncoming target. Let alone with it going into slow motion where you can't see your balance meter, and then sodding well freezing to a static photo that must be dismissed with yet another button press, by which point you've forgotten what they hell you were doing and inevitably crash into a wall. It's so mind-numbingly stupid. Now imagine trying to enter NTT mode (clicking both sticks) when the flaming camera field gets in the way. Aarrggghhhh!

Oh, and that camera you have to set up yourself? So, so broken. I had to snap myself doing a flip trick over a fire hydrant. To score well you have to have everything in shot, be facing the camera as you go past, and keep your waist as near to the middle as possible. So why the cocking crikey did it keep failing me for the "fire hydrant barely being in the shot" when it was RIGHT IN THE BLOODY PICTURE? Some random setting eventually worked, but lordy lawks.

And breathe. See - it's all become so very negative, when in fairness, for the majority of the time, it's all fine. You skate about in the traditional fashion, you take on the billions of tasks, and you charge around looking for gaps and new areas in the really very huge space (1.5 times bigger than Project 8, and with no perceivable loading as you go).

It's all tremendously silly, too. The character creator has been fleshed out, but not very sensibly. Rather than letting you custom create a face and build, here you can only change the colour and the facial hair, and then faff around with clothing. This does mean that you can create a bright purple-skinned avatar, and I jolly well did, later turning him to a Henry Rollins red. Oh, and you can only play as a boy. Presumably because they couldn't be bothered to re-record all the character dialogue with a girl too. It's an odd choice to have your character speak, and an odder one to have him be a squawky voiced twit who you wish would just shut up.

While you're star-struck meeting your first couple of pros, it seems this becomes second nature to you very quickly, barely batting an eye when Bob Burnquist stands up for you in a fight, and seeming nonplussed by the appearance of Bam Margera, until he steals your wallet (which is odd of him). When Rodney Mullen told me to vandalise a car parked in the street, so I could ollie off it to grind an electrical wire onto some railway tracks, well, I was wondering at that decision to have the entire game be grey again.

One last gripe: The music selection is appalling. Half of it is thrash metal terribleness, so offensively awful that I negotiated the mangled playlist to find it all and stop it from ever playing again. Highlights like Jurassic 5, the Beastie Boys, and the Sex Pistols are lost amongst nu-rock nonsense and half-arsed hiphop. And I realised quite how uncool I was upon my delight at hearing a Folk Implosion track somehow featuring, and wished for that to be the theme. Roll your eyes in unison now.

This is the Rigging mode, with its mad collection of confusing controls.

All I've done is complain! It's not that bad! It's just so far short of Project 8's non-stop loveliness. So here are some more positives. The video editing tools, while relatively crude compared to proper editing software, is a fantastic inclusion. You can record yourself performing some "sick tricks" (as people who haven't heard of Folk Implosion might say), and then manipulate it to a remarkable degree. A recorded section can be re-shot, with you choosing the camera angles throughout, directing on the fly, or setting up cunning angles. Then the footage can be trimmed, sped up, slowed down, cut up and switched around, then treated with effects and overlays, and intercut with other films you've made, or alternative angles of the same trick. This can all then be set to music, and using some Guitar Hero 3 tech, it will judge how well your video matches the music. It's a huge amount of fun.

Nail The Grab is every bit as brilliant as NTT. And switching back and forth between the two during vert tricks is simple and intuitive. You can pull off some remarkable manoeuvres this way. Sadly, Nail The Manual is a bit poo, unsatisfying to balance, far too fiddly, and very unrewarding. But who cares, because NTG and NTT are ace.

The classic modes are worked in very nicely. You'll find arcade machines in various places, which let you play "Tony Hawk's 2000", which is basically Classic Mode, confined to a section of the city, letting you collect SKATE, jump gaps, score points, etc, in the two minute limit. And there's "Hawk Man" - a pleasingly silly arcade mode where Pac-Man-style pellets appear everywhere, and must be collected either by grinding, through air, or manualing, according to their colour.

Hurrah for video editing! Best bit.

Multiplayer has been fleshed out, and you can now race around the entire city with your chums, or simply have them hang out in your private residence. There are eight modes, including the stand out Tron mode, where you leave large coloured trails behind you for other skaters to avoid. But the online best serves just letting you ride around with buddies - something Project 8 strangely didn't let you do.

Some sort of conclusion, then. I feel disappointed with Proving Ground. The multiple modes, with individual progression based on the challenges you take, is all good. The challenges themselves, and the landscapes in which they exist, are mostly dull and uninspired. Where Project 8 felt like the result of Neversoft's having gone away and thought long and hard about what to do with their ailing series, Proving Ground feels like an attempt to just stick a load more stuff into the mould, without enough thought. The rigging feature is too awkward to have justified such a major part of the game, and too much else is glitchy and clippy. And yet, it's still a solid Tony Hawk game, with vast amounts to do and plenty of new stuff to learn. (Although, the amount of new features can have the effect of having the entire game feel like a tutorial). It's very, very big. But the dingy environments don't endear you to exploration - where Project 8 might have you stumble upon a pretty park, Proving Ground is more likely to reveal a litter-filled wasteground.