Original Release: Activision / 2005 / Gamecube, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360
Other Releases: Mobile (2005), PC (2006)
The sixth Tony Hawk game is the first with a real open world element
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (Gamecube, Activision, 2005)
Where to Buy: Play-Asia
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
American Wasteland was an attempt to blend the long-running Tony Hawk series with a Grand Theft Auto style, something that was toyed with a tad in the two prior Underground games but not to this level with a big open world replica of Los Angeles.
The setup is that you pick from one of five Midwestern character models who hop the bus from Farmville with a plan to move to the city and become a skateboarding legend. Sadly, our goofus character gets mugged literally right off the bus. Fortunately, some chubby skater girl with fat tatas happens to be hanging around and decides to give our poor goober all sorts of assistance in getting on his feet. This means a whirlwind tour of meeting the local skaters, learning new tricks and techniques, and eventually a quest to help revive a neglected skate park by both convincing big-name pro skaters to be in your skate video and also stealing random city landmarks for decorations and furniture.
If you’re new to the Tony Hawk games, as I was, the biggest obstacle to initial enjoyment is that the game is fussy about how you land from jumps and tricks and such (an arrow-balancing mechanic that the game never bothers to explain, more on that later). Until you come to grips with that, it’s more like Tony Hawk’s Falling and Bleeding Simulator. This is supposed to be one of the easiest entries in the whole series, but if you come in cold it’s rather opaque and you just fall over doing literally anything (not helped by Crazy Taxi-esque movement and camera system that is far from without jank).
But it turns out there is a little method to the madness here, as your character starts without anything but the most basic moves and must learn everything gradually as part of tutorial missions attached to the story mode. This puts the game in a weird space where it’s apparently too easy for series veterans (judging by online reviews and complaints), but it ends up being inexplicable to newcomers as the Tutorials really don’t Tutorial very well.
The tutorials generally explain the button combos for a move but not some key added element that it won’t work without. You get a good example of this right at the beginning. One of the first things you’re taught is a “manual”, or skidding along on two wheels for a while. This is where that mysterious two-arrow bar rears its head again; what are you supposed to do with it? Keep it in the middle? Keep it in the green? You generally either fall or stop before you can get useful data from experimenting with it. I had to stop the game and go look it up online, turns out you’re supposed to keep it in the middle, and you also really need to transition to the D-pad while it’s on-screen for the precision you need to not overcorrect. The game doesn’t even mention that this thing exists, it just throws it up in your face and lets you figure it out.
The next one, the “revert”, was a showstopper for me though. This should be a simple matter of riding up a quarter pipe and then back down; the problem is, your character only moves at a Casual Cunt pace and I couldn’t figure out what button makes him kick his damn foot and accelerate to get enough speed to actually ride up the ramp far enough. Like, I couldn’t even find an explanation of this online. There’s a smaller ramp immediately behind you, but you don’t carry momentum between the two. So that was the end of the story mode for me for awhile.
But all this is OK, because my MO with open world games is almost always to put the story off as long as possible and just wander around pushing the boundaries as far as I can. The problem here is that Sim LA has little to do and doesn’t turn out to actually be that big (more like whirlwind tour of LA tourist areas instead of San Andreas). You can tag a few spots with some guy for some quick cash, you can find an occasional hobo who will pay you to jerk off to you doing some specific move for him (which you probably don’t know yet), you can find a few exciting things to jump off of, and you can buy new shoes. That appears to be about it. It’s also not a true “open world” in even the GTA 3-ian sense, it’s clearly self-contained little nodes linked together by loading tunnels.
At this point I decided the game raising my blood pressure with some series of moves that it only half-explains how to do was not good for me and called it a review. This one is for people like me who aren’t into skateboarding, generally aren’t into these games and are wondering if this has anything to offer with its “open world” style – it doesn’t. The funny thing is, complaints from series fans are about this same structure but in the opposite direction; they resent being dragged through tutorials of moves they already know from previous games and found the whole enterprise just too slow and stifling.
Links
Pretty good licensed soundtrack at least
Videos