Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 Reviews
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5's rare moments of nostalgic joy are drowned out by its abundance of faults.
Robomodo's attempt to resurrect the long-dormant Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series is not a success — in fact, fans of previous games will likely see it as a slap in the face.
Glitch-ridden and seemingly unfinished, this is a tragic swansong for Tony Hawk's video game career.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 exists to exploit any nostalgia you might have for the earlier games, offering an insulting dearth of worthwhile content in exchange for your money.
Even if the gameplay was everything it could be, this title still has its challenges
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is riddled with glitches and offers almost nothing new to longtime fans of the series.
Don't play this game.
It might be best to put ol' Tony Hawk's Pro Skater out to pasture. It's best to remember what it was, rather than dwell on what it has become.
Fleeting moments of genuine enjoyment can be found in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, but with unresponsive controls and constant jarring bugs, the enjoyment is never sustained.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 should be remembered not just as a bad game, but as an indicator of the industry's hubris, where games are continuously released in a broken state. It's a shame, because if there was more time then Robomodo's efforts may have eventually led to a fantastic skateboarding game. Instead a classic franchise has been tarnished and an audience scorned.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is not only the worst game in the franchise's history, but it may very well be the worst game to be released this year. Yes, worse than Hatred.
The game clearly isn't finished and even it was the lack of ambition, and budget, is painfully obvious at every turn. A sad, pathetic end to a classic games franchise.
The series might have once had potential to be revived, but Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 makes sure that all signs of life have been squeezed out of it.
I didn't outright hate Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, as it distills a lot of the franchise's good points into an arcadey modern format. There are flashes of brilliance, but much of that is piggybacking off of the foundation its predecessors have already created. Considering that Activision signed a deal with Tony Hawk for more games a while back that's set to expire soon, I sincerely hope change is on the horizon if more titles are in the cards.
[D]espite the fun character customizations, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 suffers from a number of issues, including laggy multiplayer, dipping frame-rates, and off-putting physics. Sorry, Tony, but nostalgia can't save you this time.
In my professional opinion, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 can fuck off.
It is a shame I didn't get to spend as much time with Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5 as I would have liked or needed. Despite the massive amount of bugs and fatal crashes, there is some fun to be had here. Anyone who played the older Tony Hawks games will feel right at home. Unfortunately, it is impossible to look past the constant problems and bugs. Most of these don't make the game unplayable, but still cause a lot of bother along the way. With only seven levels to explore and play through, your time with this game might be short (and made shorter with the frustration of its problems), but the addition of the player created levels mean there is a little something extra, even if it's nothing we haven't seen before. It is sad that the game turned out this way, because it really should, and could, have been the sequel that the series deserved, and instead has fallen so short. For a full priced retail game, these bugs and design flaws can't be forgiven, and being unable to play the game after only five hours was the final nail in the coffin. Should the game become playable for me again, I will happily play through the rest of the levels, explore the game a bit more, hopefully form a fuller opinion, and write an addendum to this original review, but for now it's not skating by.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is easily the biggest disappointment of the year for me. Not because I expected it to be great; but because I expected it to at least be enjoyable on some levels. Sadly it fails on almost every attempt. The core skating feels good, but never satisfying, and everything surrounding it just feels flat. I wanted this to the be the resurgence of the series, but it feels more like a budget game wrapped in a AAA game price.
In summary, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is pretty much a poorly done remake of THPS 2. In the year 2000, this game was innovative, fun and an absolute delight to play. But this is 2015. There should be dramatic changes in the gameplay, in the challenge, in everything! To replicate a game that is older than my nephew and to have it come out on a new generation console with bugs? I'm kind of surprised someone actually even took credit for this game.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 had the potential to be awesome. Instead, we're left with a game that's solid but is buried beneath so many issues that it feels like it's still in beta.