Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Review – Cowabunga

After the series received a well received rejuvenation with the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 back in 2020, fans have been anxiously awaiting a follow-up with the next two entries in the series. For a while, it was looking like this may not happen after developer Vicarious Visions was essentially absorbed into Blizzard, leaving the series without a developer. That was until teases started happening earlier this year that got the hype train going, and now the series is back again with a new developer in Iron Galaxy for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4.

Is this re-imagined re-release worth the wait? Read on to see whether the wheels fall off or if it’s a skateboarding game that has you pulling stunts with the best of the lot.

Let’s Shred

Back in the day, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was a really big deal for continuing to evolve the series in major ways, including the addition of revert to allow you to string many more combos together. The modern gameplay additions were wisely retroactively added into the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 remake to make them perform even better, so it naturally carried over back into both 3 and 4 4 perfectly. Revert isn’t all, as the mechanics found here in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 are pretty much the same as the first remake, which is a great thing for players to feel right at home jumping to these “new” games perhaps for the very first time.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 includes the largest roster of playable skaters to date in the series, with 30+ skaters that does not even include your created skaters. Of course, you have Tony Hawk includes, as well as classic staples like Chad Muska, Elissa Steamer, and Bucky Lasek, but Iron Galaxy also gave some props to the younger generation of skaters here too. This includes skaters like Chloe Covell, Jamie Foy, Yuto Horigome, and Rayssa Leal, which helps to round out a stellar cast to choose from in the game.

Although based on video games that are more than 20 years old, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4 look fantastic in 4K at 60 frames per second. Some of the stages are especially standouts, such as the Cruise Ship, Waterpark, and Pinball, where the game takes great advantage of lighting and visuals to really wow the player as they skate around each locale. Sometimes a game that requires fast paced movement can feel sluggish in action or have awful pop-in, but this one performs very well.

There is no doubt that there will be frustrating moments where you might even want to throw the controller if you bail during a long combo, but it’s almost never the game itself. This is because the controls in the game are so precise, allowing the player to string together all sorts of combos on the fly and try to accumulate points, which is crucial for completing some goals and competition stages. Pairing together flip tricks, manuals, and grinds can be a key to success, but how you rack up points is entirely up to you. That is why is still so fun about these games all these years later is that they are so well designed to the point where you could play the same stage 100 times and be able to play it 100 different ways in how you get points.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4 offer several game modes to choose from, with the main course being Career. Within Career, you have the opportunity to play through stages from both 3 and 4 separately as part of their own campaigns. 3 is pretty straightforward, where you have nine stages from the original game, each with goals to complete in them. Three of the stages are competition-based, where you have to manage the highest score combined in two out of three heats. As per usual, these are unlocked gradually as you complete more goals, with the competition stages requiring at least a bronze medal to move past them. However, if you get stuck in 3 and want to move on, you can jump right into 4’s first stage and move forward from there.

While the first remake for 1 + 2 and the remake of 3 in this game is very similar to how it was in the original release plus s0me upgrades, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 is where things were actually altered quite a bit. Back in 2002, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 tried to evolve the series beyond it’s timed mission-based scope and instead offered a more free skate style across the game’s levels. Rather than retain that format in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, Iron Galaxy decided to take those stages and transition them to the same timed mission-based format to match the other games in the remakes. This did cause some uproar when it was first announced, but it actually works quite well here, albeit with some missing features.

There are some missions such as the skitching of the professor’s car in the College level or freeing Stompy the Elephant that require you to initiate the sequence each time you restart, while it would have been going continuously in the free skate version prior. Additionally, several goals have been removed or modified in this version. The mini-games found in each stage have also been removed too, which is a major letdown for those who wanted a remake of the original with the same content. However, what is still available in the game is still a ton of fun and fits the overall style of the game better than if they had altered the structure of the game between the two.

One major change from the original that is really disappointing, though, is that Chicago and Carnival, as well as the PS1 version exclusive Sewers and Little Big World, did not make it into the remake at all. In addition, the Zoo stage is a downgrade as well with the removal of the live animals that made the original a lot of fun. I know the development team had limited time to work on the game, so perhaps they could not get something to work right in those stages with the animals and more moving objects in the Carnival, specifically, so that may be a reason why. The good thing, though, is that they didn’t leave us empty-handed as they added three new stages to the game for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4’s portion with Movie Studio, Waterpark, and Pinball.

Something New to Shred By

Movie Studio is a competition course, which it made sense to have added to match the three found in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and is a fun stage to maneuver between it’s two levels. Waterpark is much more expansive and has a unique design setup with lots of teleporting doors to move to the top of slides and ride them down to the bottom. Pinball is the last one you unlock in the game and may be the most creative of them all too, as it replicates as if you’re skating in a giant active pinball machine. With these added, it brings the total number of parks available to skate in across the two games to a respectable 19, match the same number offered in 1 + 2.

Just when you think that you are just about done with the game, that’s where the game opens up even more with the addition of the all-new Pro Goals. After successfully completing all goals and getting a gold medal on all six competition stages, you will unlock Pro Goals in the game. These add an additional five goals for you to complete in each regular stage, as well as a special goal and a platinum medal being added to the competition stages. The standard Pro Goals are a new Platinum Score and collecting the letters to spell out C-O-M-B-O, while the rest are more level exclusive and I really had a good time working to complete them as the original goals were tough enough at times.

Every stage also has a number of collectibles for you to obtain, with Stat Points being the most important of the bunch. This allows you to upgrade your skater in whichever categories you choose, with the end goal being to max out all of them once you find all of the Stat Points. There is also cash that you can use to buy boards, apparel, and even some items in the Secret Store, which gets items from finding the hidden Iron Galaxy collectibles. There are also some hidden collectibles like the Hidden Deck and panda plushies found in each stage that can take some unique maneuvering to get sometimes.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 has some fun unlockables to work towards, with you able to purchase them in the aforementioned Secret Store mostly after you unlock them in the game. My personal favorite unlockable was that of Ninja Turtle Michelangelo that fits in right with his skater due aesthetic. On top of that, you can also unlock additional skaters like the much requested Bam Margera, Andy Anderson, and eventually Birdman. There is even Officer Dick replacement Constable Richard, who is still hilarious voiced by Jack Black, but that will certainly take awhile to unlock. Deluxe Edition owners even have access to Doom Slayer and Revenant from Doom, which is really cool.

Beyond trying to complete goals and finding all of the collectibles, the game also features special challenges for you to complete. These are broken down into challenges for THPS3, THPS4, Skater, Tricks, and then the later unlocked Expert 1 and Expert 2 challenges. Completing challenges here will unlock rewards and also give you a piece of puzzle that makes up an image without the challenge section. Some of these are absolutely insane, so be prepared to fail, fail, and fail again until you maybe get lucky and finish the hardest of them.

If you get tired of playing the regular stages and completing goals, you can always take the action to multiplayer for a new challenge. The game offers both offline and online multiplayer, where you can participate in Competitive, HAWK, or Free Skate. Competitive is pretty fun to go head to head with up to seven others at once, though be prepared to face the best of the best at times. HAWK takes the idea of the S-K-A-T-E letters and lets you hide H-A-W-K around the map for the opponents to find. Free Skate is also there as just a chill option to have fun online with random others or friends, which I enjoyed them including.

What is a Tony Hawk game without music, right? As always, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 has a large soundtrack of solid songs to jam out to while playing through the game. Unfortunately, a number of songs from the original games did not make the cut, but there are still some staples returning like Ace of Spades by Motorhead and My Adidas by Run-DMC. There are some notable missing artists like Alien Ant Farm, but at least some that had one removed like Iron Maiden has a replacement song by the same artist added. The new additions feature the likes of Run the Jewels, Mastodon, Lupe Fiasco, and The Dead Milkman, as well as some tracks from DOOM for Deluxe Edition owners, which all come together to be a very enjoyable lineup to listen to while grinding around each stage.

The game also returns the Create-A-Park feature for those that are creative and want to build their own parks and share them with the world. Building parks is never something that I have much interest in doing, but I really do have fun with skating in parks created by others just to see what kind of crazy ideas that others can come up with.

Verdict

Fans have been asking for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 for a number of years now and they should be mostly satisfied with the end product. The same addictive and refined gameplay is back from 1 + 2, but this time based on two entirely different games. There’s a lot of new content with the Pro Goals and few new stages, but the downside is that there were also some cuts when it came to content from the fourth entry, including entire levels and weird removals within existing levels like the lack of animals in Zoo. The soundtrack may also be a bit controversial due to the cut songs, but the development team did a great job putting together a replacement soundtrack mixing old and new. Even with some of the changes, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 offers top notch addictive gameplay that is highly entertaining and can be enjoyed by pretty much anybody.

Score: 8.5/10

Pros:

• Smooth gameplay as in previous collection
• Largest cast of skaters in series
• Well designed new stages in THPS4
• Addition of Pro Goals
• Enjoyable additions to the soundtrack

Cons:

• Missing levels from THPS4
• No mini-games and some missing goals in stages in THPS4
• Number of classic songs cut

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.

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