Grave Gamer News & Views — tony hawk pro skater 5

The Half-Pipe King Returns in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5

You can’t keep a good skater down. You can break every bone in their body, snap their board in two, and slap ‘em with a hospital bill bigger than an island nation’s GOP, but you just can’t keep them down.

The genre defining, physics defying classic is back in THPS5. Robomodo, the crew that brought us Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD, are rolling forward with the sequel on Activision’s dime.

The dev hopes to capture the series’ now classic over-the-top mechanics and spruce it up for the new age (kind of a trend with these revivals). Power-ups and projectiles (?) add to your skateboard/frail human arsenal. A bevy of new levels that play host to a bevier amount of missions can be tackled by your lonesome or online with friends. Progression accumulates online or off.

No date has been slapped on the deck but we know the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game will launch first with last-gen versions arriving sometime after.

Time was, it seemed as if EA’s Skate franchise face-planted Tony’s arcade skater into the ground. Since that series has left a four-wheeled void in the skate-sim market, maybe THPS off-kilter brand of extremely extreme sports gaming has room to wiggle. Is Robomodo chasing a ghost, though? Shit, if the soundtrack is half as good as it was back in ‘99, who cares? I’ll grind a ghost.