For me, Tony Hawk has always been about crashing through plate glass windows. The early Tony Hawk skateboarding games were fanciful concoctions in which the extreme sports star would skate through fragile windows and collapsing floors. When the more realistic Tony Hawk Underground game out, I was frankly bored by the realism and frustrated by the finicky controls. But Tony Hawk: Shred reminds me of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4, letting players crash onto collapsible roofs, bring floods and break lots and lots of plate glass.
What It Is: A Sequel With a Fancy Peripheral and a History of Complaints
Shred is the sequel to Tony Hawk: Ride, which introduced players to a game controller that is essentially a wheel-less skateboard that the player stands on and steers in the manor of a real skateboard. Jumps are achieved by popping the front or back of the controller into the air, grabs in the game are triggered by grabbing the board at certain points, other tricks result from spinning and tilting the board.
Ride didn’t receive very good reviews, or sell well, although I saw a kid I knew play it with incredible enthusiasm. It was certainly a unique experience, but the board was difficult to steer and its distinctive approach didn’t necessarily make up for the frustration.
When a control scheme isn’t successful, game designers making a sequel can either fix the problems or work around them. While there was an attempt to fix the problems, according to an article in the Chicago Reader, I wouldn’t say it offers more than a minor improvement. But game developer Robomodo has very smartly designed levels for the game that ameliorate much of the original’s issues.
The biggest problem in Ride was the steering. In its simplest mode, “casual,” there was no steering; the player rode along a virtual track and was only responsible for performing tricks and flips. But in the two more difficult modes, “confident” and “hardcore,” players had to steer themselves, and this could be very frustrating, especially if players needed to make sharp turns.
What Was Fixed: Tweaks and Additions Add Up to a More Solid Experience
Shred has addressed this issue with two changes. One is the introduction of a third difficulty level between “casual” and “confident” called “casual plus” in which you steer within a path. Basically you are following the same track as in the easiest mode, but instead of being on rails you are bounded in an area a few feet in width within which you can maneuver. This allows players to feel like they are really skateboarding and steering while keeping them from getting into too much difficulty.
There is one more small change, the addition of a guideline that stretches out a few feet from the skateboard to indicate your precise direction. I found it quite useful.
The other change involves level design. When I got Ride out to compare it with Shred, I saw instantly how unfortunate Ride’s first level was. It was a big, open area that would probably be a lot of fun to skateboard in real life. Unfortunately, the steering issues meant I spent most of my time crashing or trying to get out of a big basin area.
In Shred, open spaces have been replaced with what are essentially long tracks. Players are constantly moving forward. While there are branching paths, and while you sometimes have a choice between a high area like a rooftop or a ground area, you are rarely required to make any sharp turns at all. Steering is more a matter of veering this way or that, as when you see three large pipes in front of you and must decide which one to go into. Steering is still rather difficult, but it’s doable for the most part, although there are sections where the controls still obstinately cause you to turn too much or too little.
What You Do: Skateboard and Snowboard for Stars
The result is something narrower but more fun. One of the main aspects of skateboarding, in which you simply go up and down performing tricks, is virtually gone, but while it’s not a pure skateboarding simulator, it is a lot more fun than Ride.
Playing through the game involves a series of challenges. When a new level is unlocked, you begin by riding that level, which is populated with floating point icons of varying amounts. The goal is to hit the best point icons, perform score-increasing tricks and reach the end within a time limit. Score are converted into stars: earn enough stars and you can go on to various challenges that involve skating through short lengths of a level while performing specific tricks or just maximize your score in a small area.
The biggest addition to the game is a snowboarding mode. It’s pretty much the same as skateboarding, except there is more of a downward slope and there is less plate glass. I found it less exciting than the skateboarding portions, but it’s still fairly entertaining, with most of the strengths and weaknesses of the wheeled parts of the game.
Levels are fun, with treats like crashing through something to open floodgates or snowboarding along a cracking ice shelf, and the game is decent looking. I also liked the rock sound track, which is better than that of many sports game.
How It Turned Out: A Few Flaws but a Decided Improvement Over the Original
While the gameplay is pretty solid, within its limitations, some things in the interface could be improved. For example, I really don’t want a celebrity sports figure to appear in video form every time I win a few stars to congratulate me. These videos cannot be turned off, although thankfully “helper” videos that tell you how to do tricks you fail at can. You’ll want to turn these off, because every time you make a minor mistake in a trick you know how to do you will be pestered with instructins, however, it would be nice if at the end of a failed trick you could press a button to call up the appropriate helper video; always on or always off is a terrible system. (The game’s reliance on videos is a little irksome; text could have easily appeared at the bottom of the screen to give you instructions.)
Another quirk is that even though you can use the skateboard as a Wii controller, the game will still pause if your regular Wii remote powers itself down. This is inexplicably bad programming, although hardly a game breaker. While most of the game has been built upon, there is less character customization available than there was in Ride.
All in all I enjoyed Shred, which is certainly an improvement over the first game. For me, it has the feel of those pre-Underground games, even if the controller does make it more work. It’s good exercise, good fun, and a good outlet for those who want to bloodlessly skateboard through plate glass.
