Tony Hawk Shred is a sequel to last year’s Tony Hawk Ride, a game notable for its controller, a full-sized skateboard clone that lets you play the game much as you would ride a real skateboard. It’s one of the most physically arduous of all video games, and also slightly dangerous for non-skateboarders, since you’ll find yourself rather precariously balanced on the board, flipping its nose up by pushing down the back with your foot and twisting your body to move your avatar around.
I had Shred demoed for me by the seven-year-old son of one of Activision’s PR flacks. I must say, I quite like child PR people; they don’t have any talking points and don’t make speeches about the importance of the franchise and what direction it is taking.
Shred has the same controller and same moves as the first game. The visual style on the Wii, the only platform I saw it demoed for, is more cartoony than Ride. There is also a more wild and wooly style of level design, with things like plate glass windows to crash through and a variety of colorful levels. This seems to be an attempt to appeal strongly to kids (the adults in the room emphasized that the designers had focused on things in the first game that appealed to kids), but I quite like this approach myself; it reminds me of the pre-Tony Hawk Underground games, which were fun and silly.
A new choice has been added to the difficulty settings. In Ride you had “casual,” in which the skateboard steering was done for you, “confident,” which allowed free skating but which would cheat a little for you to line up tricks, and “hardcore,” which made you rely entirely on your own skill. To these has been added “casual-plus,” which has a set path like casual but allows you control over steering within that path (it’s as though your traveling down a three-foot wide road). It seems like a good choice for those who found casual too restricting and confident too difficult.
The big addition is snowboarding, which uses similar mechanics to let players glide down a mountain doing tricks. It looks to be a nice little addition.
I liked Ride, although honestly I was too lazy to play a lot of it. That’s why it’s such a good game for kids; they have crazy amounts of energy. This game looks fun and kid friendly and, since I’ve still got a bit of the little boy in me, I think it will also turn out to be me-friendly. I’m looking forward to playing it, to the extent my laziness will allow, when it comes out this fall.
