Skate, Skate & Skate! (Tony Hawk's American Sk8land (DS))

Member Name: DocDan3

Product:	Tony Hawk's American Sk8land (DS)
Date:	02/09/09 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Animated Graphics, Vivid Colours, Challenging, Many Levels, Online Play, Some Soundtracks

Disadvantages: Boring, Repetitive, Low Replay Value, Low Popularity Online, Sounds

Tony Hawk's American Sk8land is a pretty good game for the Nintendo DS as it's fun to play and contains a whole load of tricks to pull off like all the other Tony Hawk's games. It makes great use of the DS microphone and touch screen for controls and voice chat online.

The main story mode as cut scenes, which gives the game a bit of a story although it's pretty poor. You are making your own skate park and as you progress through the different levels such as Los Angeles and other skate parks, you earn money by completing challenges and you can buy more bits for your park.

The challenges within the story include many things such as pulling off tricks worth a certain amount of points, and gaining as many points in a given time limit as you can as well as collecting things within time limits or throughout the level. You go up to people within each level and speak to them to start challenges and you can free roam in your spare time, which is good.

You can create your own character and improve them as the game progresses as well as designing your own skateboard for them using paint and the touch screen to draw on designs. There are other modes where you can just freely skate around the levels to practice. There are so many tricks to pull off and you can do special tricks by tapping the special buttons on the lower touch screen once you start a trick. This will improve your score but you need to balance your skater using the directional pad to earn big points, which can be quite hard. You do get an opportunity to redeem lost points in this game by 'raging out' if you fall over after a trick. You hit three bars to stop them moving up and down and the more filled up they are, the more points you redeem back so it's not all bad news when you mess up.

The graphics are respectable as they are animated and of quite a good quality. The colours are vivid and everything has a sense of realism to it. The sound quality is ok but not that great. There are many commercial songs integrated into the game including my favourite, Holiday by Green Day, which adds a better feel to playing the game. The controls are great but it can be hard to keep your player balanced using the directional pad. Great use of the touch screen is used in the game and the microphone senses your voice when playing a series of small challenges online with players across the world. The online play isn't as popular as it used to be so it's actually hard to find a game, but it's a good feature. I wouldn't recommend this game as the replay value is low and it's not that fun unless you are a hardcore skater. You can buy it used and new for just £4.49 on amazon.co.uk, which is quite tempting.

Thanks for reading,

Dan ©

Summary: A rather boring and repetitive skating game