Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

The alleys are the trick. Every time you leave Hollywood for the Downtown blocks or the beach, the game funnels you into a narrow corridor with a rail down the middle, and while you grind it the next district quietly finishes loading. It was the headline feature in 2005 and it still reads as a clever piece of engineering rather than a gimmick, because the corridors are built as skateable terrain instead of hallways. You rarely notice you are being managed. That was the whole point.

What the continuous city bought Neversoft was a Los Angeles you could cross without ever stopping, and a story that leaned on it: a kid off the bus from Kansas, absorbed by a scene of squatters and hangers-on, gradually hauling ramps and rails and chunks of scavenged architecture back to a derelict lot to build a park out of the city's leftovers. It is the most explicitly narrative Tony Hawk game to that point, and the writing is broad in a mid-2000s punk-poster way, which will land or not depending on your tolerance for that register.

The skating underneath is the mature version of the formula, with wallplants, the bert slide and the natas spin folded into the manual-to-grind chains that had already grown baroque by Underground 2. BMX arrives here too, playable in most of the same space, and it is the weakest addition: the bikes handle heavily against the board and mostly serve to make the combo system feel less precise. The city, generously stocked with lines, does more for the game than any new hardware.

Age has been kinder to the structure than the tone. Objectives still arrive as short, sharp challenges you can retry in seconds, and Classic Mode strips away the story entirely for anyone who wants two-minute runs and a goal list. The framerate strains in the busier stretches, and the open world is smaller than its ambitions suggest once you have learned the shortcuts. But there is a particular satisfaction, still, in rolling from a demolished movie lot to your own half-finished park without the screen ever going black.