Activision has officially responded to the complaints about Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5. The game is riddled with bugs and glitches and is nigh unplayable for some people. Nevertheless, the company wanted people to know that they are looking into these complaints.
NeoGaf had a thread about the statement issued from the company, which reads...
We are aware of the issues that players have experienced following the launch of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 and are working with the developer to address these so that we can continue to improve the gameplay experience for all of the Tony Hawk fans who have known and loved this franchise for more than 16 years.
There's a gif included in the thread that shows Tony Hawk attempting to transfer off the wall into a grind and after completing the transfer and beginning the grind, he instantly just crashes and ragdolls on the ground.
The game was designed by Disruptive Games and Robomodo, replacements for the long-running Neversoft who previously worked on the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series and the original developers who helped bring the brand into prominence with fun-filled design and great controls and gameplay. However, Activision closed up shop for Neversoft back in 2014 and the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater license was passed down to Robomodo who proceeded to make mobile titles under contract for Activision.
The developers were then tasked with bringing a new entry to the series to light for home consoles. However, after the first footage of the game went live a lot of gamers complained that the title looked old and outdated and had poorly designed physics.
Leading up to release Activision had Robomodo alter the graphics to use a more cel-shaded look. However, cel-shading wasn't enough to save Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5.
Once the game released there was a torrent of complaints about a number of issues, mostly technical related. The Metacritic page for the PS4 version of the game currently sits at a user rating of 2.2. Many of the reviews cite the bugs mentioned above about miraculously crashing for no reason or encountering other gameplay debilitating problems.
The common complaint is that Activision charged $60 for a bare-bones game that was filled with a lot of quality assurance issues. I'm not entirely sure what was going on behind the scenes but it was obvious from the moment the first gameplay trailer was released that something was wrong.
Nevertheless, there were enough fans of the old games that tried telling everyone that maybe Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 would turn out okay. However, after the reviews started filing in and more people managed to get their hands on it, just about every complaint people had about the game leading up to its release turned out to have some merit to it.
Activision claims that they will look into improving the gameplay experience but we'll have to see if they stick to that. For now, a lot of people who spent $60 on this title are feeling kind of burned on this latest Tony Hawk outing.
