The Tony Hawk brand of video games has come to a nice balancing point between fun and skill, maximizing the aesthetics while maintaining a great experience. Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam for the Playstation 2 is no exception to this evolution, with easy to pick up controls and just plain interesting gameplay that make it another worthy namesake to the series.

The key to Downhill Jam's success is its simplicity; while most skateboarding games don't require a vast amount of intellectual input, DJ takes this even further with defined downhill courses that take a lot of the "exploration" factor out. Your objectives for each race/event are intuitive and easily accomplished with practice and determination. The fun really comes from the competition whether it is the in-game adversaries or yourself as you attempt to better your track record, trick combinations or just nailing that hard-to-reach grind.

Multiple locations give players a wide variety of courses that range from standard closed tracks to traffic-choked streets and mountain jungle paths, everyone will find at least one if not more visually appealing and challenging track to embrace. While exploration is not absent, it takes the form of trying to find the best grind locations, which may represent secret shortcuts to beat your competitors, and even then sometimes these are blatantly pointed out to you with big arrows. My issue remained, ‘now how the heck do I get there to use that grind spot?' Regardless, each environment is chock full of interactive features to hit, literally and figuratively: punching and kicking benefited against other competitors, but proved to be one of my guilty pleasures as I nailed hapless tourists. Tee hee. But it all comes down to racing, the bread and butter of this game.

Whether it is against the AI or against your friends in head-to-head, the game shines with an apt capturing of competition. The AI is so good that I still have several tracks that I just can't for the life of me get that gold, but hey that's the challenge of it. Winning is a combination of figuring out the track with its turns and secrets, and being proactive in actually going up against the other opponents. Sometimes this required taking them out at key points, while at others it required hitting as many tricks as possible to fill your boost gauge and letting go. Even with secret paths, some of these fictional competitors are still hard to beat, taking every ounce of my will to overcome.

Secondary to the races are different downhill events like lone slalom, trick runs and fight courses; all are welcome diversions from the norm that force you to get better times, points and hits to progress to better tracks and unlockables. Each of these unlockables, whether they be boards, characters, costumes or tracks, were spread out in a nice fashion so that I truly felt an achievement getting there.

Downhill Jam's graphics are on par with a lot of Playstation 2 games. While there is no ‘wow' factor, there are definitely no obvious anomalies which detract from the title. Sound is excellent, with a continuous rotation of good bands providing worthy background music that jams with you. The one nit I could point out is the repetitive cut scene movies of Tony Hawk skating downhill while occasionally doing some slide rotations; these seemed out of place and contrived, and essentially contrary to the action actually contained in the game, like some sort of real-life buzzkill that Corporate ordered, to add realism to a blatantly fictional game. So I just skipped through them - problem solved.

For fans of the Tony Hawk series this is a no-brainer; the game is accurately done, with little deviation from an already established formula. For those into snowboarding games, you might find just as many thrills and spills as your concrete-bound brethren. And although it may be considered a niche game, it has tremendous appeal to nonchalant gamers with its head-to-head gameplay and ease of picking up. It may not offer many surprises, but it does offer a lot of fun and hours of replay value.

Jun 27, 2007 | 0 comments
Paul Bishop