Home Page / 360 / T / Tony Hawk's Project 8 / Preview Listing / Preview

Few franchises are ever able to stand the test of time while still remaining fresh and enjoyable while bringing in new fans but not isolating old ones. The Tony Hawk franchise started 2 console generations ago on N64 and PS1. 7 games later, the franchise still has legs, and it’s skating as hard as ever. Released yesterday over the Xbox Live Marketplace, the demo for Tony Hawk’s Project 8, the eighth installment in the popular series, gives players a taste of what to expect from the newest iteration of the Birdman’s franchise.

The first thing you notice when the demo boots up is, obviously enough, the games visual style. While the last few entries in the series have had a somewhat animated, cartoon-like style, Project 8 returns to the roots of the first few entries in having a style much more reality based. The area you play in during the demo is a standard skate park area filled with rails, ramps, quarter pipes, a bowl, and pretty much everything you could ask for in a skate park. The area is populated by several NPC characters, some who stand around, some who skate around the park. As you ride around and get a feel for your surroundings, you’ll notice markers floating around that resemble exclamation marks. Activating them, for the most part, will bring up a screen with a brief description of what that feature will do in the full version of the game, while there are a couple of them that are actually functional.

Controlling the game immediately feels familiar and comfortable, allowing you to get right into the thick of things immediately. The game controls smoothly as you could hope, and the animations are excellent, as usual for the series. Surprisingly enough, the demo itself comes complete with it’s own mini set of leaderboards, which is extremely cool in it’s own right, giving you a reason to continue to replay the demo leading up to the games full release just over the horizon. There’s a leaderboard available for all the missions available in the demo, as well as for highest combo. It’s awesome to see this sort of attention to detail in a demo, and I can only hope we’ll see more of these sorts of inclusions in future demos as well.

Inside the demo, you’ll get a chance to test out a few of the games objectives as well as the brand new Nail the Trick mode. I won’t get too deep into the mode as of yet, I’ll leave that for the review of the full product, but suffice enough to say for now that it’s rather addicting, works great, and is a much welcome addition to the ever expanding gameplay of the Hawk franchise.

The area you’re allowed to play isn’t huge, but it’s perfect for getting warmed up in if you’ve been away from the series for a while, or if you’re (somehow) new to the series in general. The demo is timed, but there’s no on-screen display to tell you how much time you have left. When the demo ends, it does so without warning, and then boots you back to the dashboard. It’s the only questionable design choice in the entire demo.

The demo is the first chance I’ve had hands-on with the title, and after a few hours with it, I have to say, I’m very excited for the full product. It seems to be a bit more of a back-to-roots approach to the series, opposed to Underground 2 and American Wasteland, which had a bit more of a goofy, over the top feel. Unless something goes terribly wrong in the next few days, it’s a safe bet that Neversoft and Activision have yet another winner on their hands for the holiday season. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, do so. What do you have to lose?