Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 Gameplay Video Has Some Problems

I missed the gameplay reveal for Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 during the E3 live-stream, but after watching the video footage it appears I didn't miss much. The new gameplay was detailed ever-so-slightly by Tony Hawk himself, and you can check it out below.

GamesHQ Media captured the video during Geoff Keighley's little intermission interviews between the big E3 conferences that took place on YouTube's live-stream. You can hear Tony Hawk explaining how he enjoyed working with Robomodo and that they wanted to bring the feel of the game back to the old Tony Hawk series. We also get to see various tricks and stunts taking place throughout the five minute clip.

We see the board catch fire while riding through it, giving the board a flaming theme for a bit. We also see that grinding through electric nodes will give the board a bit of an electricity sparkle to it for a while. It's not mentioned if these do anything more than change the appearance of your board or if they're used for a specific purpose like in some of the other Tony Hawk titles.

We see a couple of stages on display and get a feel for some of the stunts and the game's physics systems.

But now it's time to be completely honest: this game needs a lot of refinement.

Many of the YouTube comments also bring out the same thing. The animations are clunky looking and disjointed at times. It doesn't appear as if they're using procedural animations either. You see how characters quickly transition from one move to the next as if it's cycling through prefab animation sets as opposed to dynamically adjusting the character to the physical conditions of the map. I know that technique is a far more complex form of animating characters, but the tools are there and the hardware technology – especially on today's home consoles – absolutely support that kind of feature; heck, it's in the new PES 2016 and NHL 16, and has been widely available since Backbreaker.

While I know graphics aren't everything, the major problem here is that it looks like old software tech possibly upscaled for new hardware.

As a cross-generation title there are certain concessions gamers come to expect from such games, but this was a bit much. If the graphics weren't going to be spectacular I think many fans were at least hoping for more realistic or dynamic physics system, you know something similar to Insomniac Games' Sunset Overdrive or even the Skate games. And barring advanced physics and graphics, I think some people were at least hoping for maybe procedural animations offered in tools like Unreal Engine 4 or Unity 5 so the skating at least looked real.

In a way, I can understand why Activision was reluctant to give this game a lot of the spotlight. It appears to be a budget title and it's made cross-gen most likely as a way to recoup whatever they put into it.

There's still time for them to fix a few issues before it releases later this year. And, on the plus side, at least it supports up to 20 players online.