Previewed: October 1, 2005
Previewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Activision

Developer
Neversoft Entertainment

Release Date: October 20, 2005
Genre: Sports
Players: 1-4
ESRB: Teen

Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)

American Wasteland promises several new features including for the first time ever, the total freedom to explore the massive city of Los Angeles in unprecedented detail, and by utilizing next-gen streaming techniques, all without any load times, as you travel from Santa Monica to Hollywood, to Beverly Hills, just to name a few.

Also new to the sequel is the addition of a BMX bike. Skateboard purists need not worry though, the bike is merely an alternate mode of transportation and is not required to finish the massive story mode, although you would be missing out on a lot of great gameplay including a refined BMX physics and trick engine.

Along with the big city comes a big story, or at least enough of a narrative to motivate you through the anticipated 25+ hours of gameplay. You play a simple kid from the Midwest, freshly dumped by your girlfriend and alienated from your parents. You hop the bus to L.A. for the adventure of a lifetime.

As with Tony Hawk games of the past the gameplay is based on performing a variety of missions or stunt objectives. These come in the form of sponsor challenges that will reward you will skill points to upgrade your boarder in an RPG-lite fashion. The other more complex missions will reward you with one of more than 40 major stunt pieces that you will use to build your own Skate Ranch.

Gameplay is totally free, allowing you to skate around the areas of L.A. you currently have access to, interact with NPC’s who will often give you trick assignments, and visit a bevy of stores where you can tweak the look and style of your characters from anything from hairstyles to tattoos. Your appearance will even factor into a few gameplay elements forcing you to change-up your look from time to time.

The trick system remains totally intuitive, although it is greatly enhanced with all new “bert slides” (surfer-style moves), cave-man combos, and extensions to the Natas spin. The list of tricks is now beyond counting with all new technical additions that will challenge even those who claim to be Tony Hawk masters.

I had the chance to play American Wasteland on Xbox, PS2, and GameCube as well as the new Xbox 360 (covered separately). Controls were spot-on with the PS2 as expected. The DualShock has always been the preferred controller for this series; even so much as to spark an adapter to use the PS2 gamepad on your PC. The Xbox was a close second although the triggers and black and white buttons are ill positioned compared to the shoulder buttons of the PS2. The GameCube brought up the rear, although I have never been a fan of the Cube controller.

The variances between the systems were even more apparent in the visuals. The Xbox was stunning, running at a crisp 480p and smooth framerate. The PS2 looked good but not quite up to the glamour of the more powerful Xbox. The GameCube version looked just plain bad, blurry, pixilated, and a single-digit framerate when panning the camera around. But I was assured that the Cube build I was playing had not been given the final treatment for visuals, so I will withhold final judgment for the final release.

American Wasteland has some authentic 80’s punk flavor with some great visual stylings from renowned skateboard artist, Jimbo Phillips, not to mention tons of licensed graffiti art from real L.A. “urban painters”. The game oozes with style from the opening bus ride to your exploration of a fully realized Los Angeles.

Sound was pretty much solid on the Xbox and PS2 with the former offering custom soundtrack support, although with more than 70 hot tracks I doubt you will get tired of the music that comes with the game. Again, the GameCube suffered from some tinny sound that seemed to be the result of extra compression, perhaps to fit all that music on the minidisk. Admittedly, I was playing with headphones so again, I reserve final comments for retail releases played on my home theater system.

American Wasteland once again goes online, this time adding Xbox Live support along with several new multiplayer modes like Pot-o-Gold, and Tag. The former has skaters trying to snag and hold onto the pot-o-gold while busting as many tricks and combos as they can racking up big scores. You can only score while you are in possession of the pot.

Tag was my favorite of all the modes I got to play online. It has all players free skating around the level and whenever you do a trick off of any object that object gets painted in your color. This is an awesome way to instantly see who is doing the most tricks and where.

Fans of past Tony Hawk games will love the new cooperative Classic mode that features many of your past favorite levels, only now you can play with a friend and divvy up those objectives. It’s not quite feasible to check off the entire list in the two-minute window if you work together as a team and play off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

While you're counting the days until you can skate and BMX all over L.A., check out our collection of screenshots in our Preview Gallery.