Fool me once, shame on you. Fool three or more times and I must be an idiot. Vicarious Visions, stop making the DS version of Tony Hawk's games a shadow of the games I love. Tony Hawk has been "miniaturized" on the DS—again—this time in the form of a downhill racing extravaganza of mini-games. To explain this, the developers, Neversoft, that make the Tony Hawk skateboarding games that most gamers have come to know and love, don't actually develop every Tony Hawk game out there. There is another developer by the name of Vicarious Visions that has been taking care of all the handheld iterations of the recent Tony Hawk games and been doing a pretty good job of taking games that are easy to love and turning them into games that I find are a chore to play. Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam is a perfect example of this because, simply, Tony Hawk was never meant to be a racing game.Now I have always loved Tony Hawk games. You wouldn’t be far off the mark if you called me an all-out Tony Hawk fanboy. I admit it. But as such, I can tell you exactly what isn’t Tony Hawk, and Downhill Jam is not Tony Hawk. Sure, his name goes before the subtitle, he has some spoken lines in the game and you can still do kickflips, but the similarity train stops there.
For all you Tony Hawk veterans out there that remember the first game, do you remember the sub-par level that was actually called “Downhill Jam”? The dam level? Yeah, that’s what this whole game is. It’s not the golden formula of open-world skateboarding with side goals thrown in, no, no. It’s pretty much the SSX snowboarding games but on a skateboard, and it really doesn’t transfer over well. For one, the trick system just isn’t conducive to the whole racing bit: doing tricks actually slows you down, but you have to trick because it’s the only way to boost up your new “boost meter”, a meter that basically does just that, allows you to boost to catch up after tricking.
There’s also problems with the way your combos work out— namely, they don’t. The DS D-Pad just doesn’t seem to be able to handle the quick input necessary to come out of your 360 airwalk and into your nose manual. It’s really the manuals that are the issue because you need them to keep your combos together, and the DS only registers the input for them maybe every second attempt.
The whole thing is packaged pretty oddly, too. The cutscenes and all the in-game art have this weird, kiddy look to them that really kills the long running “cool” credit the series has established. The sound is also a hit and miss affair. Tony Hawk still can’t voice act—no surprise—but at least there is real voice acting in the first place. The music is appropriately energetic but still manages to be really boring since there are only about ten no-name tracks in the game anyways, and you can really only listen to them so many times until you start playing with the volume off. Oh, and you’ll also want the volume off so you can avoid hearing your skater tell you that he “got owned” over and over after every time you make a sloppy landing.
Put this all together with fugly graphics (muddy textures and really stiff animation) and a storyline that’s bad even for a Tony Hawk game and you’ve got yourself a real waste of thirty dollars.
