Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 Review

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 was a brilliant update to the signature digital skating experience back in 2020, but old salts like myself definitely felt a pang of sadness that Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 was not part of it. The idea of a monstrous “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2+3” product danced away in our minds like some perfect, unattainable goal – considering that THPS 3 was easily the peak of those early games and I will hear nothing of any arguments against it. All logic suggested they’d surely never remake the third entry by itself, and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 was such a unique (and somewhat compromised) option that the idea of bundling the two seemed extremely unlikely.

But how wrong we were, for the Hawkman cometh – and with him comes a bevy of nostalgic skating mastery.

This is the best approximation of myself I could muster

Dropping into the pipe, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 easily impresses purely by virtue of bringing the THPS 3 experience back to the masses, with a slick set of visuals and all the memorable goals and locations you remember. This really was the peak of classic digital skateboarding, where every option available to you felt valid and worthwhile, before innovation shifted away from how to make skating feel good and more towards gimmicks that would pad out the dot-pointed features list on the back of a game box.

This definitive control scheme is every bit as marvelous as one would remember, with a rich tutorial option to get the newbies onboarded in rapid fashion. For the already initiated, it means you can spend the lion’s share of your time ogling the impressive new visuals that come from a modern lick of paint, experiencing that weird modern quirk that remasters and remakes do where you find yourself thinking that it surely always looked this good. Buzzing across gaps and grinding ever higher on telephone wires is a timeless feeling, though it doesn’t hurt to see a few more polygons thrown in the mix – your fingers clearly remembering all the inputs needed to avoid a broken neck.

There was an initial level of friction when I realised that the goal options for the career mode had been homogenised – simplified, really – for the sake of streamlining the arcade’esque progression of it all. It actually took me a hot minute to grasp this, as I felt my old head memory trying to understand why I was doing an Airwalk over an escalator, when the game did not ask this of me. I then realised it’s because the skater-specific goals had been distilled down to one universal list for all characters in the game – a confusing change, considering the blueprint for these goals existed in the original release, but perhaps done as a way to excuse new skaters not needing a unique location for their S-K-A-T-E letters in every level.

THPS 4 is present, sorta

Long term lovers of the series will also dig the soundtrack, although there are some interesting concessions made. Not every track from the past games is present, but the offset of this is the inclusion of a ton of new tracks that blasts the total number of skater jam sessions to a whopping 59 songs. Skimming the included (and excluded) options highlighted that the songs I considered critically essential to the identity were present, with many of the new inclusions doing a better job of turning me on to great music than ‘Spotify Discover’ could ever hope to achieve – something the series has always done a good job at, so it’s actually pretty neat to see it happen some more all these years later.

The strange side of it all comes from how Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 has been implemented within the collection, knowing full well that the original title was a far-out execution of the Pro Skater formula. Gone are the open, roamable levels with their NPC characters offering objectives, instead choosing to massage these outings into a far more traditional THPS 1/2/3 style effort. It almost feels like an admission of defeat, that the ‘daring to be different’ attitude present within that game is now relegated to being a relic of that era – the overwhelming same-ness of the original trilogy bearing down with crushing weight on what could be achieved in this four-parter experience. When you divorce yourself from the expectation of properly playing THPS 4 again, and instead see both of these modern platforms as dutifully trying to emulate a very specific archetypal skating playground, it works – but for those that consider THPS 4 to be their favourite Hawkman sandbox, there is sure to be disappointment.

The H-A-W-K mode is genius, developers should add hide and seek to every game

Alongside the familiar content of both 3+4, the release also throws in some pretty exciting new additions – both by way of skaters and new parks to injure yourself on. The new parks are astoundingly good, almost fooling my brain into thinking they had been in these games the whole time – and the fact that we have not ever had a dedicated waterpark experience before now feels criminal. And no, that little pool section in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2’s section barely counts. This rounds out well with the improved Create-A-Park feature, which now has the capability to add goals to a park – offering a pretty rich canvas for would-be skatepark gods to flourish.

Skater wise, there are some clear gimmick additions – shoutout to Doom Slayer and the Ninja Turtles – but the far more interesting additions are some new skaters that help expand the roster, particularly from a position of equality. Young skaters like Chloe Covell and Rayssa Leal do a lot to perk up my daughter’s interest in the game, especially after she was forced to watch me try and wrangle the game’s woeful Create-A-Skater option into making a crude facsimile of her dad. It was exactly the same comment I made to the 1+2 collection, that the odd fleshy homunculi offered within this corner of the game are curiously awful starting points – like sitting down to make a clay pot out of lumpy, compromised mud. You can at least turn to the clothing and deck options to do some of the heavy lifting to cover up the nightmarish abomination you call an avatar, and a rich offering of unlockable fashions within the game blunt of those sharp edges a bit, but players have clearly been spoiled with recent offerings to the point of making this one appear comically bad.

A special level of attention has been given to multiplayer for this outing, with some of the best modes from times past returning for a new generation of trickheads – such as my long-time favourite Graffiti, which allows players to claim areas of the park, king of the hill style, via pulling off enormous tricks and combos. A new addition that quickly became my favourite, was ‘HAWK mode’ – a seek and collect-style option that first allows players to hide the letters H-A-W-K (much like the familiar S-K-A-T-E goal in the career mode) before other skaters take their turn to try and find them. It’s a banger of an idea, and I will continue to bug my friends to come and HAWK with me for the foreseeable future.

DoomGuy gets to enjoy some downtime shredding

Final Thoughts

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 fits in as the logical endpoint of the classic skateboarding experience, albeit doing so with a slightly sketchy landing. As a package, the 1+2 collection made perfect sense as being near identical games from an era of very iterative sequels, but the 3+4 avoids any clashing by simply avoiding that awkward conversation. Admittedly, the excellent experience of THPS 3’s mechanics elevates the chopped and changed THPS 4 reproduction to a point where it isn’t a huge bother, but it’s still something that needs to be acknowledged.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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