This is a good game. Review outlets are getting that much right. Here’s what they’re rarely (if ever) admitting though:
This rebuild from Vicarious Visions may leave a bad taste in your mouth at times, especially if you’re someone who noticed the jump changes in their Crash Bandicoot outing. The control inputs here are noticeably optimized for joystick over the d-pad. Jump height and distance, along with momentum, can be pretty unreliable. Moves are randomly delayed; sometimes failing to register at all—this mostly happens during transitions. While much has been made of the improved graphics, there’s a lot of muddy texture fills popping all over the place (primarily at a distance). The game is quite dark in a lot of places. The stages feel less arcade-like, which causes certain objectives to be difficult to spot. The camera seems closer to the skater, which also makes traversal harder. Some things about the locales have been altered. And there’s a noticeable delay of about 5 seconds when restarting a run. That doesn’t sound like much, but you’re apt to encounter this hundreds of times. The menus are somewhat convoluted (think Trials Rising). And, the music volume sits midway in the mix, even at the loudest setting. I had to lower the noise effects, then increase the TV volume significantly to resolve this. Most of these things can be resolved in a patch. And the rest are pretty mild annoyances. I just hope all the uncritical praise the game’s receiving doesn’t see its flaws ignored by the studio as a result. While Tony Hawk HD may have been a shorter game, with the majority of this one’s features missing, that game controlled like a dream by way of comparison to this one. As someone who 100%’d that game, I hope these critiques aren’t dismissed out of hand. I’m really glad this exists. And it’s not as though the studio’s pushing a minimum viable product. I genuinely think it’s a good game. But, there’s marked room for improvement.
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