Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

From time to time the glory of old times shines through and you start having fun. That is, before you are brought down again by the uninspired level design, the outdated visuals and the redundant missions.

If I hadn't seen it coming I would be really annoyed now. You don't treat a 15 year old heritage like that, careless and without love. Romomodo & Activision: Please don't make Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 6.

Most egregiously, this game costs $60. That’s about $50 too much. A better choice? Go crank Goldfinger’s “Superman,” fire up your old PlayStation or Dreamcast, dig up a copy of the original game, and relive the glory days the right way.

Die-hard fans yearning for some Pro Skater action will find that, despite all of its problems, there's still some enjoyment to be had here – even if it should have been so much more.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 fails to recapture the magic of the first four games.

This new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater feels old in terms of technology and gameplay. It plays the same old song again, but with a lot of bugs, a terrible interface, disappointing maps... Just avoid it.

Fleeting moments of genuine enjoyment can be found in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, but with unresponsive controls and constant jarring bugs, the enjoyment is never sustained.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is a set of good intentions but bad execution. It’s fantastic to play like we played 15 years ago, to get that gameplay experience. But we need more in the time that has passed. We need a better level design, more varied missions and new ideas. Also, this game has poor graphics and bugs on PS4. This is inexcusable.

This skater not only fails by today’s standards, it wouldn’t even be passable during Tony’s heyday. Lousy controls, bland visuals, and an abundance of bugs make Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 a broken mess.

Despite the fun character customizations, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 suffers from a number of issues, including laggy multiplayer, dipping frame-rates, and off-putting physics. Sorry, Tony, but nostalgia can’t save you this time.

Its moments of thrilling gameplay and competition-rich multiplayer are sideswiped by bad performance, the poor implementation of Slam, and frequent glitches. The series might have once had potential to be revived, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 makes sure that all signs of life have been squeezed out of it.

A mess. While the mechanics are slightly unpolished, they still have a similar feel to what we’ve come to expect, which can result in some enjoyable antics. Unfortunately, they are contained in a constrained formula where the player must navigate menu after menu to get into repetitive and uninteresting missions.

Tony Hawk is simply unplayable, looks awful and is infested with bugs. An outright tragic ending to a legendary franchise. [Sept. 2015, p. 066]

Pure garbage. This game's still in alpha status and thus isn't able to carry on the legacy of the franchise. Shame.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 does a disservice to returning fans and newcomers alike by removing most of what gave the original games flare while being simultaneously riddled with glitches.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5’s rare moments of nostalgic joy are drowned out by its abundance of poorly thought out levels, control problems, bugs, and its glaring lack of attitude. It boggles the mind that a $60 game in 2015 can be riddled with so many technical issues.

Not just a missed opportunity, but an insulting and pitiful gamble on the Tony Hawk name that deserves little more than a collectible agreement to pretend it didn't happen. [Dec 2015, p.84]

While nailing a huge combo still feels incredible, the fact that the skill aspect of the game has been massacred by bugs, glitches and poor design makes this throwback difficult to recommend. [Issue#263, p.70]

How? Why? What the hell happened? How could Robomodo fail in such an amazingly spectacular way? This game is the last nail in the coffin for the series, and an utter disaster. The gameplay is broken, gigantic glitches happen every minute or so, the Slam mechanic is complete nonsense, and it’s even disappointing when it comes to pure content. Forget about it.

Overall, the joy of playing the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is negligible. All we get is the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia for the glory years of the series, when THPS games weren't made hastily and without ambition.

Robomodo's Activision-mandated update most often challenges players, strangely, not to score big, but stupidly.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 should be remembered not just as a bad game, but as an indicator of the industry’s hubris, where games are continuously released in a broken state. It’s a shame, because if there was more time then Robomodo’s efforts may have eventually led to a fantastic skateboarding game. Instead a classic franchise has been tarnished and an audience scorned.

Within THPS5 lies a basic skating game that's difficult to enjoy, because you have to jump over numerous hoops and ignore a plethora of obvious issues to find the smallest amount of fun. Previous THPS games were able to capture your imagination, and motivate you through character progression, gear, interesting levels, and even a great soundtrack.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is bad. Not bad like Michael Jackson, more bad like a Super Mario Bros. movie, like an Xbox One announcement at E3, like a game made without enough time, money and consideration. A new low.

If Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 were a budget game, I'd have a hard time recommending it to anyone. At full retail price, it's a disgrace. Labeling this as the fifth entry in the series has effectively backfired: it's a constant reminder of how much greater the originals were, and how much you'd rather be playing them instead.

Avoid this one like the Black Plague.

I had an impression that the developers intentionally butchered Tony Hawk’s classic formula in every way imaginable. For the last couple of years Activision has been trying hard to finish this series off and it seems it finally succeeded. [12/2015, p.58]

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is a bad, bad game that fails to deliver in any meaningful way and is just insulting to the fans of the original ones.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 is a shocking game in every respect. It's not even bad-good. Avoid, or ask for your money back.

For games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, people invented early access. This game is just not finished, even the soundtrack cannot save it.

This Hawk has had its wings clipped to the point where it resembles an ugly-looking, flightless dodo that deserves its own extinction. [Christmas 2015, p74]

Activision and Robomodo should, frankly, be ashamed of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5. If promises to fix the game are met and it, eventually, becomes a more faithful entry to the classic series, the Birdman’s last outing will still go down in history as an absolute hatchet job.

It all feels thoroughly pointless...The rumour mill has it that THPS5 has been shoved into stores so prematurely because Activision's Tony Hawk license expires at the end of the year; we suspect that had the Birdman known this would have offered up an extension for free. [Dec 2015, p.118]

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is empty with broken gameplay and technical issues. Everything we love about the old games is gone. It is almost like the development of this game stopped halfway.

The only thing worth knowing is that no part of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is worth your time. It's bad. Real bad. And not the type of bad that makes for good comedy, either. It'd be bad at any price, but it's especially egregious that the publisher is charging a full $60 for this sucker. It'd be something you'd want to avoid for even a third of that price. Don't waste your time. You deserve better. Tony Hawk deserves better. Hell, even guest skater Lil Wayne deserves better.

In summary, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is pretty much a poorly done remake of THPS 2.

The game clearly isn’t finished and even [if] it was the lack of ambition, and budget, is painfully obvious at every turn. A sad, pathetic end to a classic games franchise.

A glitchy mess and an absolute chore to play, and should have never been released like this.

Fans of previous games will likely see it as a slap in the face.

This is something we’d make fun of if it was on Desura for ten bucks, and that’s when this stops being a funny game and starts becoming offensive – because it isn’t on Desura for ten dollars. It’s a full-priced, $59.99 MSRP, retail “AAA” production bearing Tony Hawk’s name and proudly published by Activision...It’s really, atrociously unacceptable once that sinks in.

The graphics are two console generations old, it suffers bad level design, and missions are uninspiring throughout all stages. What makes this whole experience sting even more is the fact that this bad game has so many obvious issues, that even getting through it for the sake of a review was difficult.