Tony Hawk's Project 8

This eighth instalment in the hugely popular skateboarding series, and the first built specially for the Xbox 360, is the best and most realistic by far.

While exaggerated and impossible, it's all executed properly. Every wobble, every turn, all motion-captured. The ragdoll on the bails is barking mad, even allowing you to augment its lunacy by extending the skeleton-destroying impacts, but that just makes the boring bit - falling off your skateboard - more fun.

Tony Hawk might be contracted for skating games until he’s far too old to be tearing it up on small planks of wood with wheels on, but at least the developers can still keep him going while he’s requiring medical aid to go to the bathroom and complaining about things being better in his day.

All in all, Project 8 looks good but lacks any real innovations in the controls, progression through the story or overall style of gameplay.

The Nail the Trick mode is the evolution the game has been waiting for, and it alone is enough to recommend the game.

With its great animation and the new nail a trick mode in tack, fans of the series will have no beef with Project 8.

Newbies will feel constantly overwhelmed and will dismiss this game in a heartbeat due to its high learning curve.

While the story mode is just okay, this game thrives when you're playing with friends.

As a first attempt at a brand new engine, Tony Hawk's Project 8 delivers a pretty good game. The world in this game is very fun to skate around, the Nail the Trick mode adds to the game, the challenges are mostly fun with a large variety, and the career is great. It also starred Jason Lee who was later featured in Skate 3. Unfortunately, there are a few flaws with this game that does not make it my favorite in the series. First, the bail system is awful. The hospital bill has bad controls and its very frustrating. It's like a worse version of the Hall of Meat in the EA Skate series. Second, the Sick challenges are ridiculously difficult that I question if the developers tested the goals. Finally, this games takes out a lot of customization from previous installments including less features the Create-A-Skater, no Create-A-Park, and several other creation features are absent. Despite the flaws, Tony Hawk's Project 8 is still a pretty good Tony Hawk game.

The gameplay is fine, but it lacks personality. Its very, very bland and undistinctive

In my opinion this is where the "Down Hill Jam" started. The Nail the trick feature was a rip off of Skate that was just a more complicated way to do tricks that I only used when forced to by the game. The levels were forgettable and the character creator either allowed you to be wanna-be Eminem or wanna-be Usher. The removal of create a park **** big time and the story while interesting for game-play was overall disappointing.

The Tony Hawk franchise reached it's peak very early on with the second game, which is a game I loved as a teen, and I bought this for nostalgic reasons and at least the graphics haven't changed much. There is fun to be had with this game when it first came out but the whole franchise just could not hang with the quality of the Skate games which blew this out of the water and improved skateboarding in games to a level that Tony Hawk games could not compete with. Overall this was good for a little thrash when it first came out but is worth nothing now, if you want a true Tony Hawk experience get the PlayStation out and replay Tony Hawk 2, if you want a fun and involving skateboarding experience then buy into the Skate franchise.