Tony Hawk’s Underground

You own the underground.

NA release: 27th October 2003
EU release: 21st November 2003
JP release: N/A
Developer: Neversoft
Publisher: Activision
NGC Magazine Score: 79%
Mods Used: None

With Pro Skater 3 breaking the mould of the series, Neversoft decided to go further in this direction. In Tony Hawk’s Underground, you play through an actual story of a new skater making it to the big leagues. You play as a custom character as they start out in their run down house and proceed to the amateure and professional circuits – with plenty of ups and downs, such as getting stranded in Moscow.

Another big change is own or the first things the game teaches you: how to get off your skateboard. You can walk around to position yourself really well. Although I do find it strange that it’s often much quicker to walk to places than skate. The act of getting on an off the skateboard is built into the combo system – you get back on within a short period to keep your combo and it’s integrated really well. Although the parkour is very janky.

What isn’t integrated well into THUG (the game is nowhere near as aggressive as the name and intro suggest) are the car sections. In some missions, you control some kind of car with horrible handling. There’s no stunts or tricks involved and the levels feel tiny when in a car, so you have “chases” where you go around the same block multiple times. These missions are dreadful.

What’s stopping THUG from being as good as previous Hawk games are the level designs, they’re all rather bland and getting around them isn’t that fun – the individual missions are still a ton of fun (minus parkour and driving ones) and there’s a lot of customisation. On top of creating a skater and park, you can design your own skateboard, tricks and goals, so plenty to do once you finished.

Great

We should applaud the fact that THUG is attempting something new, because it mostly works. But we can’t help feel that, story structure aside, many of the additions are a little weak.
Geraint Evans, NGC Magazine #88

Remake or remaster?

A remaster with sharing functions for tricks, boards and goals would be great.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Tony Hawk’s Underground.