With the impending release of Electronic Arts' realistic Skate title, Neversoft and crew really need to shape the Hawk series into a true next generation franchise. After all, the game itself still plays very much like the first installment from the PSOne and Nintendo 64, and the most recent titles in the series have added gimmicks that have nothing to do with skating, thus alienating a portion of their audience. The once cryptic Tony Hawk's Project 8, named not only for the storyline but also due to this being the eighth title in the series, promises to take the game back to basics while improving the actual skating aspect. In many ways it succeeds, but whether or not you like your Hawk how he is or you want a little more progression will determine how much you like what has changed.

The story-driven games of past games have been forgotten for the most part. No longer can you bicycle like you could in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland and the only real storyline is simple - Tony Hawk has come to a small new town looking for the best skaters. His campaign is called Project 8 and the local grinders are competing to crack the list. There is very little interaction with Tony or any other professional skaters during the game, nor is there any developing story to follow, other than trying to work your way up the list. Like the last title, the areas you can skate around are all located within one city as opposed to various towns and even countries. There are no cars driving around and there are no bizarre storylines to progress - indeed, many things that have become standard for the series have been removed in an attempt to take the gameplay back to skating basics.

As an up and coming skater you must cruise around the town completing various skate challenges, classic ones (like having two minutes to collect C-O-M-B-O or find a hidden tape) and ones where you must impress the professional boarders. A great new feature comes in the form of the various chalk challenges; instead of selecting a difficulty, the chalk challenges involve performing specific tasks, such as grinds, manuals or wall-rides for a certain distance. To complete the goal you only have to make it to the first marker, but making it to the most difficult marker - the SICK tag - gets you the most points and elevates you up the list. It's a fun way to retry challenges without having to change a difficulty meter and several attempts will actually increase your likelihood of success.

Your characters stats are determined only by performing the action you want to increase - performing several grinds increases your balance and the same goes for manuals. This type of stat increasing is a favorite of mine in any genre; it just makes sense to improve by performing the action many times instead of suddenly getting a huge increase from picking up an item or achieving a goal and it works very well in Project 8 (although it does take some time!) Nail-The-Trick is the other big addition. Outside of basic slow-mo 'bullet time' which can be activated any time your meter is maxed out, you can click in both joysticks whenever you'd like to zoom in on your skater's feet and create your own trick. While jumping through the air in slow motion both joysticks move a corresponding foot on your skater, allowing you to completely customize the trick and move your skater's feet whenever you choose. It's a great addition and looks spectacular, but it doesn't exactly revolutionize the series like the developers had hoped.

The rest of the game plays nearly identical to Tony Hawk titles of years gone by. You still jump and grind on things that no rider could pull off in real life, you can still nail massive combos by stringing tricks with reverts, manuals, grinds and wall-rides and all of the animations still look basically the same. Although Project 8 features some impressive motion captures for the pro skaters in the game, you just don't see them often enough to appreciate it. Furthermore, in a somewhat odd twist, the character creation aspect of the game is incredibly watered down and boring compared to Tony Hawk's Underground 2, which is a crying shame as having flexibility in determining the look and style of your skater is a big part of the fun. There is no park creator or trick creator (as seen in American Wasteland) and the special moves are limited to say the very least. It's a shame that these aspects have been stripped out and it's hard to understand why - getting back to basics in the gameplay is one thing, but why take away features that added value outside of the main game and don't actually affect the feel of what's happening within it?

One thing you can count on being improved, however, are the graphics - particularly when you activate the nail-the-trick feature, you'll notice a vast improvement in how the game look and plays. It's very fluid and looks spectacular, even managing to include a good variety of locations all within one city. There are detailed skate parks in a local run down suburb, which you will find just outside of the large main street area, where there are numerous shops and districts. It's not a huge town, but what there is of it is very well designed and it offers plenty of variety and skating opportunities, while the graphics of the city itself are polished and look like they make use of the Xbox 360's power. As always the sound effects return with tremendous results - I'll never forget being impressed by the sound of skating on a sidewalk in the early Hawk titles and it still sounds as good as ever here. The voice acting, for the most part, is good and the overall presentation of the sound where it pertains to menus, cut scenes and objectives is well implemented without being obnoxious. The soundtrack is your typical Hawk selection, spanning numerous genres and fully customizable to your liking - of course, most of us are likely to just put on our own tunes - God bless the 360's soundtrack options!

Online play makes a comeback here - but in a very stripped down way. You can free skate the entire city with other players, or in limited districts, but with no custom maps or ability to just sit back and watch other riders, the online experience feels very flat and boring by comparison to other games, and indeed even past Tony Hawk titles. Regardless of that, all the classic multiplayer modes are here (minus Horse, which has never managed to find its way online!)

Tony Hawk's Project 8 is a great redirection for the series, but it isn't quite the revolution some had hoped for. It is very much the same Tony Hawk game, minus many of the bizarre and often lame gimmicks from the last couple of entries. While this is a good thing, simply removing criticized aspects and taking a game back to what it was does not make a great title and despite some new additions to the skating mechanics, that's exactly what we have here. THP8 will be highly enjoyed by any Hawk fan, likely much more so than THAW, but it won't change the minds of those who dislike the very over-the-top nature of the series - if you're looking for a more realistic or fresher experience then you're best off just waiting for EA's enigma, Skate.

Reviewed by Christopher Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).