Tony Hawk Ride

If you enjoyed any of the Wii's boarding games, and are looking to take it to the next level, you'll have a trick-fueled blast with RIDE. If you prefer strict accuracy driven by analog sticks and buttons, however, stay far away from this one, lest your frustration finds you impaling your HDTV with RIDE's faux skateboard.

Unnecessary clunky controls make this more of a hell ride than a fun ride.

The huge level of frustration is not worth the time it takes to master the awkward gameplay idiosyncrasies. Instead, it’s more tempting – even as someone with experience – to just spam the waggle movements for a passable high score.

Tony Hawk RIDE reminds me a lot of the Sega Activator; a great idea that will play a huge role in gaming hardware innovation but unfortunately way ahead of its time. In the know gamers, to you I say: spend your money on something else because you will end up regretting your purchase, and it’s too bad.

The concept is a sound one but the technology simply falls short. I would love to see this idea fully realized and perfected, but I fear that hefty price tag and poor reception may hinder future iterations in this direction.

Tony Hawk Ride never came together. It straddles an uncomfortable line between casual and hardcore without being satisfying in either respect and it lacks the polish and presentation necessary to cover up the gameplay shortcomings...File this one under "gimmick."

The controls are atrocious, a definitely no-no when they're also your big hook. However, the game is not without any redeeming qualities. It really all depends on how much players are willing to pay for a game that ends up being mediocre at best.

This is a poor return for the Tony Hawk franchise, and the only bright side to this game is that they might make a better version in the future.

The skateboard controller looks the part but doesn't work and seems to hate the game it was designed for. It may yet fall to another game to get the best out of it.

Glitchy, hard to control, unimaginative, repetitive, frustrating, overpriced... Nobody except Tony Hawk himself seems to like it. [Jan 2010, p.73]

Credit must be given for the leap of faith and attempt at doing something new. If Tony Hawk Ride had been a success it likely would have opened the door even further for these types of games that use peripherals to emulate real life objects. The problem is that the game feels rushed, the skateboard does not respond well enough to your movements and the game itself isn’t all that rewarding or exciting.

Tony Hawk: Ride is a failed experiment that likely sounded great in a staff meeting. The idea isn’t a bad one. It’s the game that’s the problem.

The root problem is that the board controller is poorly conceived. The notion of mimicking while stationary an activity entirely reliant on motion is deeply flawed. [Jan 2010, p.88]