The release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 in 2020 felt like a sigh of relief to all of us Tony Hawk fans because we were dead sure the franchise had already died for good by then. Activision, in true Activision fashion, had exploited the IP to the maximum, sucking it dry until there was nothing else any of its games could provide. The final (preemptive) nail on the coffin for the “original” run of Tony Hawk games came in 2015, and has just turned 10. The reviled Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 was a surefire disaster, scoring 3s and 2s like it had been wearing a Superman outfit. I had never played it before writing this article, so I decided to give it a go. I needed to find out how bad this thing was and see it for myself.

Don’t even bother playing as Tony. Vert skaters have a harder time scoring points when compared to Street skaters. As a matter of fact, don’t even bother playing this game at all.

In order to so, I had to go out and actually look for a used copy online. As with most games released by Activision over the years, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 has been delisted for a while. Activision loved to drop some truly heinous licensed crap back in the day, have them rot in digital storefronts for a year or two, and then remove them from every single marketplace and pretend they have never existed to begin with. Well, it took me no effort to procure a copy for dirt cheap. I’m dead sure the person I bought the copy from thanked me forever, or thought I was a complete idiot to do so. Maybe both. With a copy of my own, I installed it and started playing. It was time to see the game that was worthy of a 32 on Metacritic.

Upon booting it up, I started looking at the skater roster, which is very different from the usual roster seen in the classic Tony Hawk games. No Rune Glifberg, Chad Muska, Bob Burnquist. Instead, you see newer faces such as Nyjah Huston, Leticia Bufoni, Tony’s son Riley Hawk, and… Lil Wayne? For some reason, the “Lollipop” rapper, as well as Tyler the Creator, are present as guest characters. Guest characters are a staple in Tony Hawk games, but Lil Wayne just doesn’t jive very well with the title’s vibe and even skateboarding as a whole. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are included as guests as well, for some odd reason, but they fit in perfectly. That, oddly enough, was already an unexpected point in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5‘s favor.

Lil Wayne is a playable character in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5. He is not a good fit.

Was this game going to be less crappy than expected? I entered the first level, and noticed that the controls, while not as fluid as the later remake of the first two games, wasn’t terrible. Clunky, but bearable. The bizarre stomp feature was idiotically assigned to the triangle button, the same you use to perform grinds, but there is an option in the pause menu that forces you to press the button twice in order for the stomp command to be performed. So, in terms of gameplay, this felt as uninspired, but functional, as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, released for the Xbox 360 a few years prior.

Regarding the level design, this was the first instance in which I was able to notice how rushed and soulless Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 truly is. Levels are a bit bigger than your average THPS 1 or 2 level, but they are absolutely empty. A bunch of ramps and rails scattered around, a pointless powerup available in some of them, no NPCs to interact with, and that’s it. Every level feels like it was crafted with an older title’s Create-a-Park editor. Every single level is bland and uninspired. Most of them are rehashes of classic THPS levels, with Bunker being a copy of the Hangar, a brand new School level looking exactly like the one from THPS2, and a terrible mountain level which reminded me of Downhill Jam.

The Ninja Turtles, on the other hand, are an actually awesome and perfect fit for a skateboarding game.

Fooling around in these levels isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it just feels purely soulless. There are three types of objectives you need to complete in each level. A handful of them do not feature a timer: those are your classic S-K-A-T-E and C-O-M-B-O collections, as well as the secret tape and DVD. The other main objectives are timer-based and need to be activated via the controller’s trackpad, or by interacting with markers scattered throughout the levels: those comprise the high score challenges, races against the clock, collecting certain items as quickly as possible, and some crappy combo requirements. There are three difficulty levels in each objective, and you need to achieve three stars in each objective in a level in order to unlock Pro Missions.

Pro Missions suck. They are vastly harder versions of objectives which can be found normally throughout a level. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 doesn’t feature controls that are precise and responsive as, say, the Underground games, so these gauntlet feel annoying and unfair. The physics do not do this game any justice; it’s pretty easy to crash on a wall or just fall like a pile of goop after performing a normal combo, just because the physics decided to make your character become heavier than usual for a few seconds. This is not a game that offers fast-paced and precise controls to go along its challenging objectives. You can easily earn enough points to unlock new levels by simply completing each area with multiple characters, so it’s not impossible to unlock everything this game has to offer. It’s just boring.

Pulling off special tricks is boring as hell. Just fill up the meter, press L1, and any trick you perform will automatically become a special one.

I guess that’s my biggest takeaway from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5. It’s not terrible in a way that makes it feel, at the very least, amusing. Nope, it’s just downright boring. I played it for much longer than anticipated, but that’s due to my dumb millennial brain feeling nostalgic anything comprised of polygonal skateboards. I wasn’t having fun while playing it, even if I did so for a good half dozen hours. It was just muscle memory.

Nothing about its presentation impressed me, either. As previously documented by other websites, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 looks like an early PS3-era game at best, a PS2 game at worst. It ran fine on a PS5, and it never crashed, but I would have been shocked if this minuscule game (it’s just 10GB in size) with underwhelming visuals struggled to run on the Switch, let alone a PS4 or PS5. Likewise, the soundtrack, whilst fully licensed, just didn’t stick the landing. It didn’t feature pop punk, ska, or alternative hip hop, as you would expect from a Tony Hawk game. It was instead plastered with stuff I’d expect to see on a Forza Horizon alternative rock radio. Again, not bad, but completely missing the mark on what the franchise is actually known for.

Not a technically terrible game, just aggressively boring.

I jumped into Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 expecting a trainwreck, but all I got instead was yet another showcase of Activision dropping a rushed piece of uninspired shovelware just to take advantage of an expiring license. It never felt laughably terrible, just aggressively mediocre and soulless. Whilst I don’t agree with the universally rock-bottom scores (it runs well and I guess the controls could have been worse), I totally get why the franchise would go dormant for a few years after the release of this disaster of a game. As of 2025, the Tony Hawk franchise is going strong, with the recent release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4  to scratch our millennial itch. It’s relieving to know that the franchise did not end with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5.