AMN's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews. This review is based off the PS3 version.

What the Game's About
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground is the ninth installment of the premier skateboarding franchise. Since the series' debut, the Tony Hawk franchise has been about defining, refining and dominating any and all comers in the genre. This year there is a new upstart in the genre vying for its stake in the form of EA's new franchise: Skate. Each iteration of Neversoft's Tony Hawk series has been more and more of a subtle refining of the previous version. Until now, the series has not had the proper competition to truly attempt to innovate or deviate from its proven formula.

Tony Hawk Proving Ground is an open sandbox game gives you the freedom to make your way through the game following three different lifestyle paths in three east coast cities: Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The career path will have you make your way to media fame. Hardcore is more of the rebel's way through the game, and the rigger's path gives you the ability to set up your own tricks and change the layout of your surroundings.

What's Hot
The core of the game doesn't stray too far away from the appeal of past titles. Thankfully, due to the less linear progression of the story, the game no longer suffers from dead-ends; where your inability to complete a goal hinders you from progressing completely. Each goal can be completed according to three different difficulty levels: amateur, professional and sick. Completing a goal by getting a pro or sick rating is much more difficult than at the amateur level, and nets you more cash. However completing the goal at any rating lets you progress to the next challenge. Completionists can always return to complete each goal for a higher ranking at their leisure.

Creating a skate-park has been refined into a skater version of PlayStation Home, called your skate lounge. You can now create and decorate your own base of operations any way you wish, provided you have the money to do so. This mode relies on the same game editor that the rigger path utilizes.

The new additions to the "nail-the-trick" mode are welcome. You have the ability to nail flips, board grabs and manuals now. The online multiplayer aspect returns in this edition and offers up the usual mix of fun with its varied game types for up to eight players.

What's Not
Proving Ground's biggest shortcoming is perhaps staying too close to the series' roots. Many of the new additions to the series fall just shy of being great ideas. The more robust nail-the-trick mode seems to be hit and miss. Sometimes the slow-motion close-up of your skateboard prevents you from properly seeing how close you are to the ground and landing your trick. You have to learn how to rely on your own timing and instincts, rather than visual cues. Landing tricks using this mode isn't very satisfying since you don't get the opportunity to see how great it looks. Instead, all you see is your board and your feet.

The rigger's path is held back by the overly simplistic level editor. Placing objects in the environment is simple enough, but when you leave the editor you might find that things don't line up quite right. Using the editor to alter your skate lounge works fine, but the game doesn't really offer any incentive to spend time doing so, outside of using it in multiplayer.



Another new option this year is the video editor. In comparison to a more robust editor such as Halo 3's, Proving Ground's editor seems to be thrown together as an afterthought. The editor has to be manually turned on, so 95% of the great moments that happen at random never get recorded. Unfortunately, those are the very same moments that make the video editor worth using. Once inside the editor, you can purchase transitions and various editing tools to help you create your clips. Due to the inability to capture the best moments during play, the video editor is all but useless.

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground looks nearly the exact same as his previous title. Lip-syncing and skin textures aren't consistent: Tony Hawk's zombie-like skin still looks like they lifted his character model out of a Resident Evil game. However, other characters seem relatively fine in comparison. Overall the game suffers greatly from a severe lack of anti-aliasing and a large amount of clipping, which is a shame since it detracts from the series' standard of large intricate environments. Proving Ground also suffers the same from grainy, low resolution video clip syndrome that seems to still plague next generation games. The same video that is fine quality for the PlayStation2 version looks out of place when played in HD.

Final Word
The latest Tony Hawk outing is overall just more of the same. The change in pacing is more than welcome, but most of the other changes to the core game are minor and don't really set the game apart anymore. Not much differentiates this title from one you could have played last generation, which is a major letdown. There are a lot of great new ideas in play with the title, but none seem to be executed as well as they should be. Unless you are a die-hard fan of the series and missed out on the last game, Proving Ground may not be enough to warrant the yearly upgrade.