Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 Review: That’s The Way I Like It, Baby

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is huge and wonderful. Now, how about a completely new game next time?

There’s a momentary sensation you get from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you won’t find in many other games. As I played through each level in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4, I’d often finish the last objective in a map with a solid minute left on the timer. Instead of exiting out and jumping into the next level, I’d always stick around, the same thought buzzing through my head: “now I can relax and have fun.”

It’s not that completing the objectives isn’t fun – it is, often enormously so. But this game, which offers an unambiguous remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and then a kind-of-sort-of remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 – has nailed the thrilling fluidity that makes simply moving through these levels, grinding rails and nailing grabs and stringing ludicrous combos together – so enjoyable. 

Landing a high-scoring combo, stringing together as many moves as possible and ending it by spamming flatland stunts to boost your multiplier, is fun, but so is a single grind down a stair rail, or doing a cheeky pop shove-it over a gap, or wallriding arbitrarily on your way to the next spot. This is the Pro Skater experience we loved in the early 2000s, recreated with plenty of love and attention, and it still feels amazing.

Fans of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 – the eighth best reviewed game of all time, according to Metacritic – are truly feasting here. This collection features every level, every gap, and every objective from the original game, but with a dramatic visual overhaul. It’s all here, from the fiery Foundry level with its walkways and pits of lava right through to the bougie cruise ship, where you can drain the pool, grind along the dinghies and send the giant medal overboard. 

THPS3 took all the lessons from the first game and refined them, with improved course designs (focused around the newly-added revert move that let you continue combos after coming down from a vert ramp) and an increased focus on tomfoolery, heralded by the arrival of Jackass alum Bam Margera in the game’s cast of playable skaters.

Bam returns for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 as an unlockable character, along with the other pros from back in the day and a cast of newer, fresher faces – like the 1+2 remake, this entry embraces the passage of time when possible, and there’s something oddly endearing about seeing all of these middle-aged pros still shredding, having grown older alongside their player base.

This new version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 is a more curious case than 3. The original – which ensued the two-minute time limit in favour of maps scattered with NPCs who would hand out objectives, each with bespoke start points and timers – was a personal favourite, and seeing the game re-jigged to look more than the first three Pro Skater games is slightly disappointing.

Some of the level goals map awkwardly to the new format, and quite a bit has been cut or significantly tweaked. THPS4 wasn’t a sacred object, and some of those changes smartly smooth out the original game’s more juvenile elements, but the end result is a game that feels less ambitious.

Developer Iron Galaxy gives you the option of extending that 2-minute limit if you so choose, so you can spend as long as you want searching for those S-K-A-T-E letters, but it’s not quite the same as the more curated narrative experience the original game offered, and some objectives feel annoyingly obtuse on the first few runs.

Grousing aside, though, replaying these levels and completing all the goals is still a true delight. Two levels (Chicago and Carnival) have been cut and replaced with three new, original levels. They’re all great, but one – Waterpark – is a bonafide insta-classic, one of the best courses we’ve ever had in a Tony Hawk game. It feels like developer Iron Galaxy is using it as an audition piece for a proper Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 6. 

The soundtrack has always been an essential core component of the Tony Hawk’s series – these are games that simultaneously introduced many people to new bands and genres, and now over 20 years later many players are looking for the nostalgia hit of listening to those same songs again. Iron Galaxy has, wisely but controversially, taken a different path here: there are 59 songs in total, and the vast majority of them are new. We have six songs from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, four from the fourth game, and then 49 tracks that have never featured the franchise before.

Say what you will about the classic soundtracks – they were awesome, and it’s lovely to still have Bodyjar’s Not the Same, Motörhead’s Ace of Spades, and Run-D.M.C.’s My Adidas to skate to. But Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has always been a series that has introduced its players to new music, and anyone unhappy can load up a playlist on their streaming app of choice. This new soundtrack is perfectly good skating music, with a few interesting jags and swerves along the way (including the Doom soundtrack in the Digital Deluxe edition, which is a weird fit that I turned off immediately). 

Part of the fun of playing a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game was always knowing that you would come back to it time and again until the next game released. I can see myself playing this remake for years to come, just as I have with the 1+2 remakes.

Between online multiplayer, the harder challenges that unlock when you complete every objective, the allure of the high score boards, and all the parts I haven’t even properly dug into yet – like the vastly improved park creator and character creator – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is huge and wonderful. Now, how about a completely new game next time?