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Tony Hawk's Underground 2 
Release date: 4 Oct 2004
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Mygamer review
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After getting dragged off of the half-pipe and tossed into a van, you come to stand before Tony Hawk and Bam Margera. Turns out the pros have gotten together and decided it was time for a World Destruction Tour - no fans, no press, losing team pays for everything. It's Team Bam versus Team Hawk as the largest ever underground skating spectacle is launched.
The two main game play modes are Classic and Story. Classic Mode involves old-school goals including gathering letters and reaching high scores on both new and old-school levels within a time limit. Whichever character you select will have the stats that your main character has earned. There are ten stats including speed, air, ollie and rail, and completing training challenges and objectives throughout the game raises them. Story Mode starts you out in a training level and if the phrase "ollie up, wallie the wallride and sticker slap" means nothing to you, spend some time here. You can ride freely or speak to the pros that assign challenges and shout "encouragements" as you attempt them. Each challenge you pass raises a specific stat and this is a great way to ease your way into the game. Veterans can skip most of this by talking to Tony Hawk. Although very useful, training can become tedious since challenges offer no option to have the pro repeat the instructions. Only timed goals repeat instructions because you have to return to the pro after you fail, and usually the areas where you must perform skills are highlighted but when they aren't your goal becomes ambiguous.
Game play is open-ended so you can move around and perform tricks at your leisure. You can even skitch by grabbing onto moving vehicles and animals. The levels are nicely detailed and include traffic, peds (pedestrians) and even a day/night cycle, however the boundaries aren't clearly marked and you'll frequently ride or skitch right out of bounds. There are tons of stashed Easter egg goodies, so make sure you look everywhere - you may even find a certain fat kid wielding his "light saber." On foot you can jump, climb and hang from objects, and there are frequently several ways of getting places and accomplishing a goal. Walking or running into a ped knocks them to the ground but you can't actually hit them…puzzling since on foot most buttons are unmapped.
Levels have four groups of goals. You are goals your character must accomplish, Pro are goals for your pro teammate, Guest goals are for a level's guest character and there are even Secret goals. You can switch between playable characters by walking up to them and pressing Circle. Once a character is found his goals are unlocked and anyone can complete anyone else's goals in any order. When you have enough points Tony Hawk sends you a text messages and you can choose to move on or continue playing. Most goals are unique to a level but some you'll find on many levels such as beating the arcade machine high score, finding the special guest and marking your territory with either a graffiti tag you've selected or custom made. Pulling-off tricks and combos fills your Special meter and when it's full L3 activates your Focus (slow motion) making it easier to land tricks. Another new feature is the tantrum. After wiping out, mashing on Triangle fills up a meter and you literally freak out, scoring a bonus towards your next combo.
When you're on your deck, Triangle initiates a grind on steps, railings, power lines, walls, and benches - just about any surface. As you grind, a balance meter appears, controlled by the analog stick. Triangle also initiates a lip trick at the top of a quarterpipe or ramp, bringing up the same meter. The longer you remain balanced the higher the trick score is. Grinding is a great way to rattle off high scores on the first few levels.
Spine transfers also come in handy because when you're tricking on a quarter pipe you automatically land on it again. By pressing L2 or R2 in the air you're dissociated from the pipe and free to move in any direction. This is simple and effective.
Making gameplay tricky is the perpetual motion - you're always moving automatically with very little control over your speed; you can stop whenever you want to but you can't just slow down so you'll frequently bump into things, pass things and fall from ledges. After crashing you'll usually restart automatically and move at a constant speed even on inclines; very rarely will you see the kicking animation. Other vehicles, while fun to use, handle even worse. Jesse James' rig and Steve-O's mechanical bull accelerate with X, and as soon as you let go of X the ride jumps automatically, so it's all or nothing. You also can't separate yourself from them as you can with the skateboard. Jesse James' rig is just as fast as the bull but Jesse can't fall off, so expect to fly out of the level every so often.
Graphically THUG 2 is nothing special. Horizontal lines appear across the screen when turning sharply or rotating the camera. A 1st person view would have helped since you can't always get the camera where you need it to be. On the first level one of your goals is to decapitate statues but after saving and reloading the statues are magically recapitated and when you fall into water your body vanishes as it hits the surface. Expect frequent collision issues when you crash, especially with Steve-O's mechanical bull which passes through everything, corrupt shadow and all. You may also see the camera pass through the level or an object within it. From the main menu or at any point during game play you can edit the playlist. Music is divided into three categories: Punk, Hip Hop and Rock/Other. THUG 2 sports a huge list of licensed tracks and any entire category or individual song can easily be eliminated. The only noticeable audio problem is on the training level. Since you can't knock the pros over, when you get close the sound of you hitting them plays repeatedly until you move further away.
Where THUG 2 excels is customization and multiplayer options. From scratch you can create skaters, parks, and goals for your parks, tags and even tricks and then use all of them online. You can even mail your picture and have your face mapped onto a character. The graphics you edit are the graffiti tags that you spray in-game. You can edit a pre-made tag layer by layer or paint over it and create something totally original. The park editor is very time consuming and tedious, but worth it if you're willing to put in the time. You can insert and rotate hundreds of objects, raise and lower portions of the terrain, adjust the park's size and even create your own goals! For example, after building a level you can create a checkpoint race - one of many types of goals. You'll name the ped who gives you the goal and place him anywhere on the level then place cones marking off successive check points. You even create the name of the challenge, and what the ped says to you before and after completing the race. It's a bit overwhelming at first but actually quite easy. You won't be able to create levels as alive and complex as those found in story mode, but you can place anything from large buildings and houses to items as small as trash cans, welcome mats and benches. You can choose starting points, but I was unable to place it on a ramp. Trick editor gives you a three second timeline to work with. You choose from five types of animations; adjusting their speed and point of execution on the timeline. You can even have some tricks overlapping on the timeline and playing simultaneously. Up to three sounds can be added to your trick, also at any point along the timeline. There's no limit to how many animations you use, but the more time the trick takes the more difficult it becomes. Rookies should keep it to no more than two seconds.
Two players can tear up created parks or any parks that have been unlocked in Story mode. Both horizontal and vertical split screen are available in the ten types of game play including trick attack, king of the hill, free skate and firefight, where two skaters launch fireballs at each other. Unfortunately fireballs only launch when you're in the air. Scavenger hunt is new; each player drops objects around the level and when all of the objects are dropped they become visible and the winner is whoever collects the other's objects first. Neither peds nor traffic are present in multiplayer and characters have extended collision so they'll knock one another over without ever touching.
All of these modes and features are supported online with up to eight hell-raisers in a room. Despite its shortcomings, THUG 2 offers no shortage of content and anyone who's ever fallen off of a board will keep coming back for more. If you don't know what a skateboard looks like give it a shot anyway. There's enough humor, special characters, freedom and customization for anyone patient enough to sit down and learn it.
Review by Dave Kaplan on 25 Oct 2004
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