Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 Review

Sixteen years after this series defined a genre, here is what was left of it. The parks are small bare boxes with nobody in them, dressed in a flat outlined look that reviewers placed below the PlayStation 2 entries it descends from. Missions repeat in tight loops with no way to skip a briefing you have already heard. The trick system underneath is still the Neversoft skeleton, which is why the game is occasionally almost fun, but the new stomp input cuts combos short by design and the slam mechanic makes landings feel arbitrary.

Everything runs against a server, so a hiccup in your connection ends a run. At launch it was broken enough that a repair patch larger than the game itself went out on day one and still did not resolve it, which tells you the build submitted for certification was never the finished build. What shipped is a licensing deadline turned into a product.

It ended two things: the deal with Hawk lapsed, and Robomodo closed within a year. The soundtrack is good, as it always was, and it is playing in an empty room. The remakes that followed five years later are the argument that none of this was inevitable.