The Tony Hawk series of games have stayed more or less unchanged since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater first debuted in the summer of 1999. That is, until now. Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam changes the formula from a skate around the park or city performing tricks to a pure downhill racer! Gone are the precision combinations of tricks to rack up the points and in is the fast paced grinding down a mountainside to beat your fellow racers.The game is pretty straightforward; you control your skater as they race downhill and pull off all sorts of jumps and tricks to rack up points or boost to get to the finish that much faster. The game is divided into different ranks, ten in total, made up of numerous events that include straight racing, slalom (race through gates to gain time), tricks (pull off tricks to get as many points as possible) and knocking down everyone (a guilty favorite of mine!) Each event is fairly unique, but they all employ the exact same method of control making each very intuitive to pick up.
Having said that, by the time you get your selected rider up through all the ranks, many of the races become rather repetitive. There are only a handful of different actual courses, though most events will start you on different places of it to vary it up a little. They do tend to get stale after a while, however. This is somewhat useful since by the time you make it to the harder stages you will have memorized most of the tracks and where all the shortcuts and secrets are located which you will need to win.
You control your skater by holding your Wii Remote horizontally and tilt it left and right to steer. The buttons allow you to do tricks as well as throw punches and kicks to knock down other riders and pedestrians. The steering is very easy to get used to, and I often found myself leaning into the turns while moving the controller accordingly! I did find that it was somewhat difficult for fine turning at slower speeds, but at the higher speeds where you will be doing most of your “jamming”, it couldn’t have worked better!
The graphics are somewhat exaggerated; all the characters have a cartoon-like look to them where the characters are more caricatures then anything else. This works well, however, since the courses are not what I would call “realistic” with their numerous jumps and short cuts and items to grind your board on.
Online multiplayer sadly is sorely lacking, as it is for all Wii titles to date. Incredibly, this was actually an option in the DS port of this game and would have added a great deal of fun and challenge to this version. The game does support four player racing through split screen action, but I’ve always found it’s much easier to find three friends online then in your living room—especially at 3am!
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a fan of the wide open areas and different tasks that have been a staple of the Tony Hawk series for many years and will no doubt continue to be so in future titles. I was a little disappointed that this deviated so much from that formula, but once you get passed the fact that this game is unique, however, you might find something enjoyable. It’s quick, fun and somewhat silly racing that is more about pure speed then it is finesse. The fast paced soundtrack and fun of steering with the controller make this a solid, if somewhat shallow, launch title for the Wii.
I've been playing games ever since I was a wee lad. My favorite games as a child were the classic Pitfall and a game called SNAFU, which was a sort of puzzle game along the lines of Tron Light Cycles. I've had most of the major console systems since the early days and have a wide range of tastes of games and I'm always eager to give a new one a try.
