Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam is developed by Vicarious Visions who has had much experience with the franchise by porting over many of the previous Tony Hawk games to the Game Boy Advance. They also developed the previous Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land for the DS. Part of the appeal of the Tony Hawk games are that it’s open ended with various goals to achieve, however Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam moves away from all that and attempts to deliver a downhill racing game.There’s nothing wrong with downhill racing games, I happen to really enjoy SSX especially being able to land humanly impossible tricks. Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam makes it very difficult to land your tricks while racing at the same time. If I do happen to land something, more often than not it’s considered sloppy and you fall behind. If you get bumped, you also lose a lot of speed. I’m not sure if it’s me, the game or the DS, but I find it much easier on a console than I do on a handheld. Sometimes it’s just easier to race downhill without really doing any tricks because they slow you down when you can’t land them. You might as well wait for the boost items. The downhill racing part is very smooth, though, if you’re just gliding; it’s just the tricks part that doesn’t feel like it’s very well executed.
The World Tour mode is where you travel around the world with Tony Hawk to try and win the tournaments. The challenges aren’t always the same, sometimes you need to just get to the finish line or do a lot of fancy tricks. Sometimes you’re hitting markers (or trashcans) instead. The irritating part about the markers is that if you miss one, you need to manually start over because it’s not really beneficial to go uphill once you’ve passed a marker. You can pause and retry but it would be been better if you could have just been booted and forced to restart. There are 6 different locations in the game, which probably doesn’t sound like a lot but these courses can be quite lengthy.
There are quick race and free skate modes for you to just get to know your downhill course and just skate around. You can also play with up to 3 friends in the wireless multiplayer mode as well as play online. I haven’t had the urge to try to play this online because I know that I’ll probably wind up losing very badly, but the voice chat features sounds interesting at least.
The graphics are cell-shaded which works on the DS. You can still customize your character’s gear, and using the DS touch pad you can also design your own logo. Cruising down the streets of San Francisco is fun, the backgrounds can be a little boring but you’re going too fast to really notice anyway. The soundtrack doesn’t seem like it has a lot of variety, but it’s there for background noise anyway. There is some voice acting from Tony Hawk but other than that, there isn’t much besides the exclamations that come out of your competitors if you hit them or pass them and some short dialogue during cut scenes.
Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam may have some entertainment value when playing in multiplayer mode but the downhill racing part can be frustrating to get into. This is probably only worth it for the Tony Hawk fans that need to get their fix on the DS or if you have a group of friends who want to play together.
I am a Canadian living in California with my husband and my precious baby Bailey (95lbs of labrador fun). I work full time and go to school, so finding the time to play video games is tough. I still manage to sneak some time in, whether it's playing on my GBA while I wait in line or sitting in the back seat of my car so I can use our dvd player to play the Gamecube on long trips. I've always been fairly decent at playing games to give my younger brother some competition. I started at the early age of 6 when I inherited an Atari 2600. I played any computer game I could get my hands on during those Commodore 64 days. Now I'll play anything from RPGs to first person shooters, racing games or basically anything that's fun and allows me to play with at least 3 other people.
