The Tony Hawk series of have dominated the skateboarding game scene for most of this decade, however, more competition lately from the likes of EA’s Skate, and less innovation from Tony Hawk, has meant that the once powerful franchise has taken a few steps back. Activision has tried something new with Tony Hawk Ride, this time including a skateboard peripheral with the game, bringing the total price of the package to $120 — quite a lot to ask for a game. Is it worth it? Read on to find out.

The main attraction of Tony Hawk Ride is the (almost) full sized skateboard, built with durable plastic and featuring motion sensing, which means that what you do on the skateboard (you play the game standing on the board, just in case you weren’t sure), is translated on the screen. Which it does, to a point. You see, the biggest risk by having something like a motion sensing skateboard, is that the slightest lag can mean ruined gameplay. And that’s exactly what happens with Tony Hawk Ride. The motion sensing inputs are not only lagging, but they’re also imprecise most of the time, rendering gameplay an almost complete disappointment. It feels very gimmicky, and coupled with unbalanced difficulty levels, neither fits — nor will satisfy — the hardcore nor the casual gamers.

The learning curve for the board is quite steep as well, meaning that it’s by no means a casual gamer’s game of choice. Far from. The easiest setting basically renders the board useless, as the only input you’ll be giving it is light steering — which you might as well have been doing with a controller. Kick the difficulty up a notch, and it just gets frustrating, mainly because of lack of settings and a bad, horrible camera at times.

The gameplay consists of a single player campaign, where your player travels to different cities around the world, where you’ll have to do some trick and speed runs. Don’t think that you’re getting huge cities to roam in though, as these fairly small and concise, fitting to the challenges. There isn’t much exploring to be done, but at least there’s some difference in the way they look. There is a multiplayer option, which will probably go down in history as the most useless multiplayer option ever, where you actually won’t see the other players, you’ll just be riding alone. Doing tricks. How exciting…

Technically, the game is a mess. As we mentioned, the board doesn’t really work, making the gameplay quite retarded most of the time. The visuals are fairly decent, but still far off from the main rival, EA’s Skate. Besides the board, the worst parts of the game are the loading times, which will go on forever. And ever. And then there’s the presentation itself, with cluttered menus that’ll take ages to navigate.

Tony Hawk Ride has a good idea and concept, but a total and utter failure when it comes to execution. It’s back to the drawing board. Or better yet, scrap the whole idea.

The Good:
The board looks cool

The Bad:
Too expensive
The board inputs fail
Looong loading times
Bad menu navigation
Feels gimmicky
Multiplayer is a joke

Overall score: 1/10