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Tony Hawk: Ride features a wireless skateboard controller designed in conjunction with the game to offer a dynamic gaming experience built from the ground up. Using a combination of accelerometers and motion sensors, the intuitive controller allows players to physically control the action by performing various movements and gestures on the board that directly translate into amazing tricks in the game. Without complex button combinations or analog sticks, gamers of all skill levels can literally step on the board and play!

Genre: Extreme Sports

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Robomodo

Online Play:

Local Play:

November 20, 2009 –
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater put the alternative sport videogame in the spotlight. Countless imitators have popped up through the years, but until recently it carried on as the premier franchise. Iteration after iteration saw it slowly fall from grace until Electronic Arts stepped up and took the lead with Skate. Rather than continue on in a head-to-head competition, mega-publisher Activision took a step back, some time off, and decided to reboot the franchise. Inspiration from Wii Fit and its own popular Guitar Hero series has resulted in Tony Hawk Ride, a US $120 game that comes with a fancy skateboard peripheral. The idea? A more immersive skateboarding game that would ride the recent wave of hit games featuring their own custom controllers. The result? An expensive proposition that neither casual nor hardcore gamers will get much out of.

Tony Hawk Ride is a vastly different beast from past games in the franchise, and that should be readily apparent from the moment you see it on store shelves. You can’t use a traditional controller. Instead, you’ll have to get up off of the couch and use a custom controller shaped like a skateboard. This board is covered in sensors that detect which way you’re leaning, whether the nose or tail are raised, or even if you’re reaching down to mimic a grab. It’s quite sturdy, too, so you don’t have to worry about kids breaking it.

In theory, playing Tony Hawk: Ride should be fairly intuitive. Brush your leg along the ground next to the board and your character on screen will push off to gain speed. Raise the nose and you’ll do an ollie. Raise it half-way slowly and you’ll do a manual. Variations and more complex tricks can be done by twisting the board or leaning forward or back while in the air.

Reality is a little less kind. Ride can be played on three different difficulties. On the lowest, called casual, the game does most of the steering for you. Players only need decide when to jump and trick. On the higher levels, steering and other assists are turned off. The trouble with Ride is that it feels like it plays itself on casual and the learning curve for anything higher is far too steep.

And when I say it feels like it plays itself, it really does. Face away from the screen or simply kick the board around on the ground and you’re just as likely to pull off big tricks on the lowest difficulty setting. Toss the controller around like a mad monkey and you might find yourself with a high score. Doing a specific move, however, is frustratingly difficult. That turns the game, at least on casual, into the skateboarding equivalent of button-mashing.

Build up a style meter and you can pull of bonus crazy tricks.Once you turn the difficulty up, you begin to see the failures of Tony Hawk: Ride. Steering is incredibly difficult, as is pulling off moves regularly. Lose your balance and lean to the side just a little and you’ll start spinning in circles, bouncing off of pieces of the environment and failing challenge after challenge. It pushes the sensitivities to the extreme and makes the transition from casual to anything else punishing and, well, not fun.

The more you play, the more you’ll also begin to notice that the physics and collision detection aren’t up to speed