Review – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 on Switch 2

While the advent of video game remakes is already many decades behind us, it seems as if recent times have seen publishers greenlight more and more remakes in an effort to draw in new and old fans alike. When approaching a remake, a developer has a choice between staying utterly faithful to the original work, or transforming it while sticking to the basic premise. I often like to think of it with regards to the ill-fated Gus van Sant remake of Psycho from 1998: van Sant pitched his remake as a “shot-for-shot” recreation of Alfred Hitchcock’s original movie as a mere gimmick, but it did raise one big question. Why would you even do that with a classic film?

Oftentimes, I lobby that same question at video game remakes. If you’re just recreating the original game, only with new advancements in graphical technology present, why would you even bother? For as good of work as Bluepoint Games has done with its Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls remakes, they are essentially still the same games as the originals. Couldn’t I just play those instead? That’s a question with no right answer, but with the two released Tony Hawk remake compilations, we’ve essentially gotten two different answers to the question.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 was released in 2020 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and would later receive ports to PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. For all intents and purposes, it’s a faithful remake of the original two games that ports over everything from the PS1 classics and includes mechanics from throughout the series’ history, including moves introduced all the way up to Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. There was actually a toggle to limit the moveset to THPS 1 or 2, but in doing so, you’ve essentially gotten those original games just with a graphical do-over. I actually really enjoy that remake, but it does raise the question of why developer Vicarious Visions didn’t go farther with updating the classics.

 

 

For Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4, we actually have something of a remix instead of a straight remake. THPS 3 is mostly the same, just with some physics adjustments from the new game engine and certain aspects of levels needing to be tweaked to fit alongside those new physics. THPS 4, though, has now been retrofitted into the two-minute timer style of the first three games, has seen broader tweaks to its level design to accommodate that timer, and has even removed a few levels while adding some new ones into the mix. It’s not really a remake, unless we take the word literally. Developer Iron Galaxy has truly remade the game in that this is fundamentally not THPS 4 anymore. Keep that in mind as I explain the rest of the game. 

There’s no real need to go over what Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is at this point as the game has been a pop-culture staple for over 20 years now. When the series originally launched on the PS1 in 1999, it married the punk-rock attitude of skate culture with the underground/nerd culture of gaming with tremendous success. It sort of bridged a gap that companies had never successfully done before, opening up both worlds to even greater mainstream acceptance in the process. By taking an arcadey approach that coupled score chasing with real-life tricks in an outlandish physics engine, it really was an embodiment of what skating was all about: pushing yourself further and further. The overnight success that THPS saw basically cemented it as an ongoing series, and Activision would continue to iterate in a yearly fashion for nearly a decade.

We all know the story though, even the part where Microsoft did as Microsoft does and folded 1+2’s developer Vicarious Visions into a support studio for Diablo projects. Heck, even just weeks before 3+4 came out, Microsoft would lay off over 9,000 people from across its various divisions, the most prominent being its gaming one. For all we know, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is going to be the last game in the series yet again, which is pretty ridiculous considering how fans are still clamoring for more Tony Hawk action… that and Microsoft’s other transgressions that won’t be directly named.

 

 

That’s a lot of preamble before I’ve even truly spoken about this remake, but it serves a point: my overall feelings here are a little conflicted. When I first booted up THPS 3+4, I was actually quite disappointed with it. In its early access period for Deluxe Edition owners, there was something wrong with the Switch 2 port of the game. It had very blurry visuals, seemingly not utilizing the DLSS technology that Nintendo’s latest console has, and it had an uneven frame rate during play. The load times were a bit long and the game was prone to crashing at seemingly random. Other users even reported memory leak issues that would affect gameplay if played for too long, something I noticed when I rebooted the game after a crash and saw a substantial improvement in performance. It was hard to get all of the negative energy about Microsoft off my mind during this period because this port felt pretty substandard.

Thankfully, a patch on the game’s true release date fixed a lot of issues. For anyone buying the game now, the Nintendo Switch 2 port appears to have full DLSS support even if the resolution remains a bit low. The frame rate is a mostly locked 60 fps during gameplay, and while the menus still exhibit a 30 fps lock for whatever reason, the game feels pretty good. I do not think the Joy-Con 2 are suitable for controlling things, but you can get used to it with enough determination. This port even features full crossplay with the other versions, so you’re not locked off from playing with your friends. This is the full “next-gen” experience on the go.

Now, I will not claim this looks anywhere close to what the PS5, Xbox Series X, or PC versions can deliver. Even in its updated state, the Switch 2 iteration of THPS 3+4 looks a little blurrier than even the PS4 version of 1+2. That’s still incredibly impressive for such a small handheld, but it does mean anyone playing docked will have to deal with fuzzy text and upscaling artefacts. It’s hardly the end of the world considering the performance, and the addition of HDR does at least make the visuals pop. Unlike other third-party Switch 2 games, the HDR calibration settings actually give you discrete numbers and allow you to dial things in on a granular level. It’s good.

 

 

Content wise, too, everything is here. There is maybe some contention you can take with certain cameo characters and references being locked to the “Deluxe Edition,” but otherwise there have been no compromises in getting the game on Nintendo’s latest platform. You have all nine levels from THPS 3 and then the 10 levels that make up this new take on THPS 4. The career mode will take you through each level with a set number of objectives you need to complete before unlocking the next. Some of these have been changed from the original titles, including goals in 3, but this is the tried-and-true formula that propelled THPS to instant classic status some 26 years ago.

The visual makeover makes every level feel completely brand-new. My personal history with THPS 3 saw me buying the game on PS2, then eventually getting the delayed Xbox port before finally playing the PC version when I got bored with the console ports. Due to how comprehensive this remake is, I felt like I was experiencing the game for the first time because levels are just so dramatically different looking than before. It’s really only Airport that doesn’t come off as too aesthetically tweaked because you can’t do much with that kind of setting. JFK International in 2025 still looks like JFK International from 2000, and it follows that THPS 3’s Airport would be the same. I appreciate the thieves grabbing cellphones now, at least.

There is one big change to THPS 3 that I feel the need to bring up, and it also applies to 4: there is shared progression between characters now. In the original Tony Hawk’s games and even in the 1+2 remake, each character had their own career progression. While you weren’t playing different levels, picking Tony Hawk over someone like Geoff Rowley meant you would need to find stat points and hidden boards in different locations. This even applied to your created skater, a feature that returns in this package. Maxing out all of the characters would take quite some time as you were required to run through the campaign with all of them to accomplish the task. In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4, you only do it once and can then apply all of those stats to everyone. That is actually a change I don’t like because I got hooked on 1+2 like the old days by beating the campaign with five different characters over a couple of weeks. At least when you finish all of the goals across the campaign, a “Pro” set of goals unlocks to give you extra incentive to go back through each level. Still, I would have liked individual careers as an option.

 

 

I’m also still indifferent to how THPS 4 has been tweaked here. The two removed levels, Chicago and Carnival, weren’t exactly classics, but they did represent the kind of “anything goes” spirit that the series always had in abundance. In their place are three new levels, which include Waterpark, Movie Studio, and Pinball, and while those levels do an excellent job of fitting in with the past, they are not the past. They are brand-new and show that even Iron Galaxy likely wants to work on an entirely new project. Would it be too much to suggest the next game actually be Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5+6, where 5 is remade to be a legitimately good game and 6 is entirely new stuff?

Anyway, those changes coupled with how all of 4’s levels now have a timer makes the second half of the career feel a bit strange. It kind of resembles the old game I played, but then it feels like an extension of THPS 3. It’s cool that skitching has been integrated back into 3, but you’re now watering down even further any of the unique qualities that 4 had. Maybe I wasn’t the biggest fan of the pseudo-open-world structure of the original game, but it marked an important turning point for Neversoft and THPS. Changing 4 this drastically does present a “new” experience, but it’s one that takes too many liberties with the original foundation. Same goes for the soundtrack, which is maybe 80% new songs instead of returning ones. Again, it’s good, but it’s not the past.

At the same time, would I have preferred THPS 4 if it remained in its original state? The stated reason from Iron Galaxy is that the dev team tried to provide a cohesive experience across both games, so it’s not as if the company wants to misrepresent things. In a way, this remake provides an alternate take on 4 where Neversoft didn’t rock the boat as much. After a decade of lackluster ports, sequels, and spin-offs, it’s nice to have a fourth entry that is so staunchly classic in its execution. Still, it does make me wonder why the first remake wasn’t THPS 1+2+3 whereas this could have been 4+Underground+Underground 2. I’m not a fan of remakes trying to supplant the originals, but then you can’t even buy the originals anymore, so there is at least a need to have the games back on consoles.

 

 

Anyway, all of this is to say that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is a quality title that has come at a truly bizarre time for the games industry. I wish I could love it more, especially since I’m a huge fan of THPS, but there are factors beyond my control that make me second guess things. There’s also the lack of a novelty factor here, whereas 1+2 came out after some truly disastrous projects from the brand. 3+4 feels like a continuation of that instead of a grand redefinition of extreme sports games, so it simply doesn’t hit as hard.

Be that as it may, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is still a worthy addition to the series and one that longtime fans are sure to enjoy. Newcomers might not quite get it, but then these remakes weren’t meant for new audiences. They were meant to recapture the attitude and style of late ’90s, early ’00s gaming and Iron Galaxy has succeeded there.

 

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