Tony Hawk has taken skateboarding games to the next level with RIDE. It’s too bad that level is crappy, small, poorly laid out, and lacks imagination or creativity in every possible facet. If you are a fan of skateboarding games, like me, you know that the Tony Hawk series was great early on, and even the T.H.U.G. releases were good, but the franchise got a little tired in the Project 8 and Proving Ground releases. Then SKATE and SKATE 2 came along and revolutionized the way we think about skateboarding games. They opened our minds about skating in the truest sense of the sport’s freedom and it’s creativity. Tony Hawk RIDE takes all the great concepts of those classic skateboarding games, throws them out the window, and goes one step further with the new controller. Unfortunately, that step also takes you straight back to the game store to get your money back. Now, if only there was a receipt for your wasted time. Hit the jump for more details.

Tony Hawk RIDE starts off with a long introduction to the new skateboard controller. First up, there is the long calibration process before you can even start a session. After 15 painful minutes of listening to Tony Hawk small-talk you while the board calibrates, you are ready to jump on and have some fun. Oh wait, I lied. Because now it’s time for you to do a very lengthy tutorial mode before you can even access the difficulty settings or do anything else. This tutorial takes you through the various motions you need to make, and what moves they will trigger. It’s also to familiarize you with standing on the device, and controlling with your feet. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Wrong. It sucks, HARD. The first thing you will notice is that the controller is horribly inaccurate, and misreads your motions on a regular basis. Trust me, buy a real skateboard and then take a hammer and break both of your knees and ankles. You would still be having 100% more fun than this game.

Now, on to the game itself. First, the menu design is horrendous. The challenge menu, once entered, literally has no escape. You have to choose a challenge from the list, wait forever for the game to load, then pause and exit out of the game and back to the main menu. This is a travesty. The single player game mode has no intelligible story at all, so I don’t have much to say on that front. All the in-game cutscenes are done in the same style as that Keanu Reeves movie “A Scanner Darkly”, a cross between live-action and cell shading. Now, mix in a lot of campy dialogue, poor delivery, and some bad comedic timing, and you get the exact recipe for FAIL. RIDE’s gameplay is just blah. The maps are laid out very poorly, feel cramped, and lack style and originality. T.H.U.G. 2 was one of my favorite skateboarding games in the Tony Hawk series. That game had killer lines all over the maps, and a good player could trick for DAYS in that game, and never hit the same spot twice. RIDE has none of that. All of the great background details you see in most skating games were also totally passed over in RIDE, and the physics are a little messed up in a couple of areas. Each city that you skate has 4 modes: Speed (a simple time trial), Trick (beat the high score shown on screen within the time limit), Challenge (follow a path and perform tricks designated on screen), and finally Free Skate, which needs no explanation. Each mode has a meter from 0-15 points. Depending on your completion or score on each mode, it will award you points for that mode. You must attain a certain level of points to unlock the next city. Some cities end with a competition bonus round that you also have to beat.

Even if you could separate the skateboard controller from the game, it still isn’t any good. It’s almost like they designed the controller first, and created the game around it. All facets considered, this game is a big sloppy mess. The obviously flawed controller is clumsy, unresponsive, and not entirely accurate. Couple that with the crappy gameplay, mediocre graphics, poorly laid out maps, and long loading times, and it all combines to make this game a total bust. And I didn’t even mention the potential risk of falling and breaking your butt on the coffee table. Even with the promise of RIDE 2, and a snowboarding game, and possible surfing game, there is no way I could possibly recommend the purchase of this bundle to anyone. At $139, you are wasting a lot of your Christmas cash on a bad experience. Stay far, far away from this game.

[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]