Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland Still Can’t Decide If It Wants to Be a City or a Set

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland wants you to believe the series has grown up. The 2005 release from Neversoft and Activision, out for PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube on October 18 in North America and October 28 in Europe, is the seventh entry in the Tony Hawk’s line and the third full reinvention of it. Pro Skater started the thing. Underground gave it a story. American Wasteland tries to give it a city.

That is the pitch, and it is also the problem. The game is at its best when it stops performing maturity and just lets you skate. It is at its worst when it asks you to care about a plot that never earns the trouble.

One Los Angeles, No Loading Screens

The headline feature is real. American Wasteland is the first game in the franchise to advertise and allow play across one vast level in story mode, connecting a number of levels without loading times in between. You ride from Hollywood to Beverly Hills to downtown L.A. without a menu or a wait. That single decision does more for the series than any trick added since the revert.

It also changes how the game feels. Older Tony Hawk’s games were collections of courses you selected like songs. American Wasteland is a place. The September 2005 issue of Game Informer ran a map of the game’s Los Angeles next to an overhead view of the Boston stage from Underground 2 for comparison. Boston looked to be about three quarters the size of one American Wasteland area, with the exception of the “Vans Skatepark” and “Casino” areas.

That is a lot of ground. It is not all good ground.

BMX, Bert Slides and a Makeover

The new mechanics land unevenly. American Wasteland is the first game in the series that lets you freely commandeer stray bicycles and perform freestyle BMX techniques similar to skateboarding. You can also get off the board entirely, and you can change your personal appearance in game. A new maneuver, the Bert Slide, joins the skateboarding controls.

The bike is the interesting one. It is not a gimmick bolted to the side of the game; it changes how you read a space, because a bike covers distance a board does not. The appearance tools matter less. They are a nice courtesy and nothing more.

What holds up is the old machinery. Create-a-park returns, dating back to the Pro Skater series. Missions still come from walking up to random people or friends and accepting whatever they want you to run. That structure is loose, and it is the reason the game breathes. You are never locked into a checklist.

A Bus to Hollywood and a Stolen Bag

The story is where American Wasteland overreaches. You play a newcomer boarding a bus to Los Angeles to escape a delinquent past. On arrival in Hollywood, a group of skateboarding punks led by Joe punch your character and steal his bag.

You meet Mindy, a local artist, who helps you fit in through wardrobe changes and a series of skating challenges led by her friends. You confront Joe and beat him in a skating contest for the bag. Mindy is drawing a skatepark in her sketchpad, which she says will be part of her magazine, titled “American Wasteland,” and which she identifies as the Skate Ranch, a “locals-only” park.

After you stop a local protest, Mindy takes you to Beverly Hills, where you impress the ranch’s inhabitants, led by Iggy VanZandt. They let you in and let you stay once you gather wood for a half-pipe.

Then the game tells you Iggy was a professional skateboarder who could not handle the publicity and dropped out of the public eye. Mindy suggests you collect pieces for the ranch, which you do for the rest of the game.

That is a lot of plot for a skateboarding game, and most of it is scaffolding. The characters are sketches. Joe is a bully with a name. Mindy is a helper who explains the next objective. Iggy is a mystery the game keeps promising to open and mostly does not.

The AmJam, the Z-Boys and a Jail Cell

The back half is more interesting, mostly because it stops pretending the stakes are personal and starts making them absurd. You compete in the Tony Hawk AmJam in downtown Los Angeles, win, and get interviewed by Tony Hawk. Then you publicly reveal your association with the presumed-dead Iggy, and the LAPD arrests VanZandt for a string of past minor offenses.

The game never says how that case ends. No charge is resolved on screen, no hearing is shown, and the story moves on to the next errand. That is the plot doing a thing it cannot finish, and it is the clearest sign that American Wasteland’s writers wanted a story bigger than the one they were willing to tell.

Seeking amends for landing Iggy in jail, you ask his old friends, the Z-Boys, including Tony Alva, for help. They agree only if you prove your old-school skating skills. You do, and they show an old photo of “Green Pipes.”

The Z-Boys sequence is the best-written stretch in the game, which is a low bar but a real one. It gives the story a history it did not have, and it treats skateboarding as something with elders instead of just a set of objectives. Tony Alva appearing as himself is a small thing that does a lot of work.

Online, and What Came With It

American Wasteland is the first Tony Hawk’s game to support Xbox Live, after online play had been limited to the PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Windows. The Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance versions shipped the same day as the console versions under the title Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land. The DS version has Wi-Fi and was the first third-party DS game with online support.

The Xbox version stayed playable online until Xbox Live for the original Xbox shut down in 2010. It is now playable online again through replacement servers for the Xbox called Insignia. That is a footnote, but it says something about how long people have held on to this one.

The Xbox 360 version launched as a launch title, with ports for other systems arriving later. Multiplayer and co-op run for up to two players.

The Release Schedule, Plainly

What Actually Matters Here

The connected city is the reason to play American Wasteland now, and it is not close. Everything else is in service of it or in the way of it. The BMX, the appearance tools, the Bert Slide, the two-player co-op — these are additions, and additions age. A seamless Los Angeles does not, because it is a design argument the rest of the series should have listened to harder.

The story is the opposite. It has a bus, a stolen bag, a sketchpad, a jail cell and a photo. It has Tony Hawk interviewing you and Tony Alva vouching for you. It has almost no reason to exist beyond giving you a route through the map, and the route is the only part that survives.

The critical aggregate sits at 7.5 out of 10 across five outlets, and that number is honest. American Wasteland is a good game with a great idea inside it, and it spends too much time on the parts that were never going to hold up. The city is the legacy. The plot is the receipt.

Neversoft · PS2 · retro game review · skateboarding games · Tony Hawk · Tony Hawk's American Wasteland