Tony Hawk Ride

Ugly, buggy and mostly boring to play. A decent peripheral wasted. [Feb 2010, p.90]

In the end, it’s a cool experiment, but it quickly goes horribly wrong.

So we're not sure what the purpose of Tony Hawk RIDE is. It's a product with a worthless peripheral, for sure. It's also running some sort of dated graphics engine transforming your powerhouse console into a Nintendo Wii.

The sad thing is that every once in a while you get a brief sense of what this game could have been. The trick-based gameplay shows occasional flashes of potential, and the board peripheral could have worked. Maybe somewhere in a parallel universe there's a reality where Robomodo pulled it off; unfortunately, we're stuck here - and in this world Tony Hawk: Ride falls on its arse, big time.

But sadly, Ride simply lacks the same quality providing and unimaginative playing experience that never seems to get out of the blocks and you may feel you’ve being taken for a ride with this game, especially considering its price!

A major fail. [Feb 2010, p.77]

Credit must be given for the leap of faith and attempt at doing something new. If Tony Hawk Ride had been a success it likely would have opened the door even further for these types of games that use peripherals to emulate real life objects. The problem is that the game feels rushed, the skateboard does not respond well enough to your movements and the game itself isn’t all that rewarding or exciting.

The career mode is insultingly linear, short-lived and your progress through it is interspersed with cheesy live-action videos of people giving you mad props for kooking your way through. In addition, when you take into account its sub-par visuals, a physics system from four years ago, and the ludicrous price of admission; RIDE is pure frustration made plastic. [Apr 2010, p.71]

Busted controls and stripped-down gameplay make Tony Hawk Ride an overpriced fiasco.

It would be easy to pinpoint the games faults solely on the new, unresponsive control scheme, but Ride's gameplay lacks several established principles of the skateboarding genre. Concepts as simple as session markers and on-foot travel are nonexistent, and the ability to restart a challenge mid-run (a longtime staple of the Pro Skater series) is simply not there.

Tony Hawk: Ride is a failed experiment that likely sounded great in a staff meeting. The idea isn’t a bad one. It’s the game that’s the problem.

Half-assed game.

This new Tony Hawk title fails in every way that Activision wanted it to succeed: it’s more difficult, it’s less fun, and it still doesn’t beat Skate. Sure, the skateboard is neat, but it, like everything else in the game, clearly is incomplete. Tony Hawk: Ride is just that: unfinished, incomplete, and broken.

Major bail. [Jan 2010, p.108]

One of the bigger pieces of gaming junk that's come down the line in recent years.