Reviews// Tony Hawk's Project 8 (Xbox 360)

The hospital bill itself is a new feature of Project 8, but it plays a fairly trivial part in the game. When you bail you get a score, in dollars, for how bad the damage is. But that's it, you get back up and get right back on your board, with no time or points penalty. The feature plays little further purpose in the game, except for being one of the targets in some challenges, in which you have to "score" a certain level of hospital bill.

The currency of the game is stokens (see what they did there, I got this token, and I'm...like... toadally stoked, dood!) and you earn these automatically as you progress through the game generally riding in a rad manner. But an opportunity was missed here - it would have added tension to the game, and promoted smooth and consistent riding, if any hospital bill you had experienced during a point-scoring run was deducted from your points total.

Once you break out of the first two areas: the residential street and the skatepark - which are basically training and practise areas - the game begins in earnest. Your aim is to build your ranking to the point whereby Tony Hawk notices you and invites you to join his new skate team. Your first challenge is to skate around the town and impress the locals at their usual skate hangouts. An arrow at the top of the screen directs you to the appropriate location, and then you have to pull a, frankly simple, trick combo in front of each group to score 1,000 points. Once that’s done, you're invited to join Jason "Earl" Lee's Stereo team, and you have ascended to the first rung on the ladder to international skate fame. At this point the game offers you an auto-save for the first time since play started.

So far, so easy, and you'd be right at this point in the game to assume that it's going to be a skate in the park. You freeskate around for a while and then you approach one of the game characters who is glowing like the people in the Ready Brek advert. Press [X] and they'll issue you with a challenge, or ask you do something to help them out. These challenges combine the ‘Collect the S-K-A-T-E’, ‘C-O-M-B-O’ and secret tapes challenges that existed on each level of the earlier games in the series. You don't have to complete every objective within the time limit, and you can replay the challenge with the press of a button when the time runs out. You can replay the last objective at any time, or switch to another one by approaching a different glowing character.

So far, everything seems pretty familiar from Tony Hawk's games of old, maybe tarted up a bit and with some of the bad bits taken out. But basically the gameplay principles are unaltered. Clearly that in itself is not enough to justify a new version of the game. So THP8 has two new features which, while they don't sound that earth shattering on paper (or on screen), do make a phenomenal difference to the game as its played.

The first is Focus mode and basically it's bullet time for shredders. When you are tricking, your special meter at the top level of the screen fills up. When you press on the left stick, the world slows down... whatever your player is doing becomes gloriously… languorous... You can use the extra time to make sure you get facing the right way and land even the most audacious of trick combos. During Focus mode, balance on slides, stalls and invert manoeuvres become much easier. But all the time you keep the left-stick depressed, your special meter and the time you have left in Focus mode is diminishing, and if you get it wrong, you’re dumped back into Real-Time mode just as the hardest part of your combo comes up.