Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5
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 Activision will never learn how to stop trying to make the quality of their major money-making franchises plummet down to oblivion, will they?
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"You know when you're describing people that are miserable all the time and you call them a 'fun sponge'? Well, that's what this game is: it's a fun sponge.
Actually, that doesn't make any sense, because if you're a fun sponge, I mean just sucking up all the fun which means that you're full of fun, so I guess that means you're a... uh... fun raincoat?
(A raincoat lands on his couch, covering him and the PS4 controller he's holding) There's no fun in here."— Caddicarus, "The Awful World of Skateboarding Games"
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is a 2015 skateboarding game developed by Robomodo and published by Activision. It is the last Tony Hawk's game until Activision lost the Tony Hawk license shortly after the release of the game, abandoning the franchise for almost five years until the release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 in 2020.
Why It Falls Off the Board
- The game had a very rushed development, with Activision pushing it for release before they lost the license rights to Tony Hawk's name, which accounts for the game's sheer awfulness and being a huge downgrade compared to previous games.
- Due to the game being so rushed, most of the game was contained in a 7.7 GB day one patch while the actual disc was about 4 GB. To add insult to injury, the game was priced at $60 at launch.
- Bland, empty, cookie-cutter levels with no thematic elements, different objectives, or even NPCs unlike previous installments, not counting the first two Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, as they have the same flaw. The one crazy, over-the-top, and out-of-place level in the game, the Asteroid Belt, is poorly designed, with rails that occasionally throw you off mid-grind for absolutely no reason whatsoever and a moon gravity power-up which was only fun as a cheat from the older games.
- Also due to the rushed development, the game had a lot of horrible bugs and glitches at launch such as the ability to bail on a flat surface.
- Terrible and downgraded graphics, comparable to previous games from 2008 and on sixth-generation consoles. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4, which were on those consoles, looked better than this!
- There is also an ugly borderline around the people in this game. It is believed that this was a poor, last-minute attempt from Robomodo to mask the game's bad graphics by giving them a cel-shaded look; which failed miserably.
- A Robomodo developer claimed that the cel-shaded aesthetic was to make it easier for the game to run at 60 frames per second. Despite that, it still suffers from framerate drops.
- Awful and very poorly implemented physics. There is a lot of clipping, with characters constantly getting stuck on walls or even the floor. It is difficult to do anything without being sent floating or crashing into what passes as scenery. Usually, your ragdoll character phases through solid objects. Also, sometimes you bail when you are lined up for a proper landing, and you sometimes also manage to land without being properly lined up.
- Awful controls; particularly the "Slam" mechanic, which disrupts the flow of a combo. It doesn't help that there is also input delay, and even input drops. Turning also feels heavy, and spinning feels unnaturally slow as you can barely pull a 180 spin at the base level.
- There is no way to customize the controller inputs at your disposition; there is no excuse for this since even in the GBA ports of former titles you are able to edit the controls.
- The special moves have been simplified, but not in a good way; upon activating special, every available move becomes a special move. There are no complex button inputs needed to pull them off, and it can make or break score or combo challenges by doing a move you didn't want.
- By default, all skaters have 0 in all their stats. This means they all play identically to each other.
- The game can crash at times, even during the Activision logo. Talk about bad first impression.
- Poor skater customization. You can mix and match bodies and heads, but that's it.
- Parts of the game literally don't work or aren't coded properly; the prompt to hold down a button to start a mission sometimes doesn't function, even if the button is being held down.
- The missions themselves are very uninspired; several of them tend to repeat throughout the game with little variation. There aren't any objectives that are unique to a given level like in THPS2 or THPS3, so it gets repetitive real fast, and becomes boring after a while.
- On top of that, the difficulty is rather unbalanced, fluctuating between easy and hard at random intervals.
- Some missions are also misleading; one mission requires the player to score 150,000 points off of a large ramp (no manuals), implying you need to do air tricks. In reality, you can grind the outer wall after leaving the ramp and going from there, which misses the point of the objective completely.
- This game nearly killed the THPS franchise, until 2020's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2'.
- The soundtrack is weak compared to past Pro Skater games.
Redeeming Qualities
- After all the real patches and updates, it's gotten better and is now an actual game, though it's still a little broken.
- The later-released PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions include the patches on the disc with no downloads needed, making these versions better in the sense that they work without patches.
- When it isn't having any of the technical issues, the game is still very much playable and the sick scores are achievable so long as you know what to do.
- Even with the game's online multiplayer servers shut down, the additional content can still be downloaded, and the single-player mode is still playable from start to finish (if you have the game in digital format, at least).
- And yes! There's Octodad in the game!
Reception
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 received very negative reviews upon release, scoring 38/100 for the Xbox One version, and 32/100 for the PlayStation 4 version, ranking among the top five lowest-rated games for both platforms on Metacritic. Within days of its release, it was already considered one of the worst video games of 2015, if not all time. The game was also considered to be a complete and utter disgrace to the Tony Hawk's franchise, even more so than the previous three games.
Caddicarus not only gave the game a 1/10 in his "Current Quickies" review, but he also made a Top 10 video showing the glitches, game-breaking bugs, and general performance issues. In his 2018 Christmas Special, this game was featured on Day 10 (#16) on his "Badvent Calendar", citing the bare-bones nature of the game and stark contrast to previous games in terms of quality. He concluded the video by saying he would rather play Tony Hawk: RIDE.
Even though Angry Joe never dedicated a video review to the game alone, he ranked it at number 4 in his Top 10 Worst Games of 2015 video, criticizing the lifeless graphics, poor level design, broken physics, and the 7.7 GB day one patch. He ended the segment urging everyone to stay away from the game.
TheSeraphim17 did a walkthrough (link to the playlist here) of the game with the intention of getting all the Sick scores, but only up to the Asteroid Belt because the game was so bad that it just wasn't worth doing the last three levels. He expressed disappointment, betrayal, and disgust at how far the Tony Hawk's series had fallen and even hatred towards the new "Slam" mechanic. He was critical of the unbalanced difficulty, generic mission templates, jittery framerate, poor physics, and bad level design. Seraphim also advised his viewers against buying the game, even though he stated that the game is playable and when it isn't being plagued with technical issues, there is some fun to be had. He even uploaded a fail video (see below) which shows the game crashing on the Activision logo.
Tony Hawk himself stated in a tweet that even he didn't like how the game turned out.
Robomodo themselves also didn't like how the game turned out and tweeted people to just play THUGPro (a mod for Tony Hawk's Underground 2) instead.
The negative reviews resulted in the game's online multiplayer servers shutting down, which in turn made most of the game unplayable.
Eleven months after the game was released, Robomodo went out of business.
On February 2018, the game, alongside Ride and Shred, were officially delisted from all digital stores. The only exception are the PS3 (Europe and Australia) and X360 (North America) versions of the game.[2] However, the X360 version is not backwards compatible with the Xbox One nor Series X/S.
Videos
References
- ↑ Disruptive Games developed the multiplayer mode. Fun Labs ported the game for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
- ↑ Delisted Games
Comments
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