Honorable mention: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 was released without the Russian language

A remake of the best skateboarding simulator for PS5 was brought to Russia — and it turned out that, unlike most of the latest top releases, it does not have a translation into Russian, even with subtitles. Izvestia studied the game and came to the conclusion that it doesn't really need localization, especially since it doesn't have any competitors in the genre anyway. This is not the only opinion in Russia: on Metacritic, the reissue's rating stands at 83 points out of 100, which means an unconditional success. But there is something in this game that no one writes about, this is in our review.

The best films about skateboarding — as a preface to the game

In 2022, the film "Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off" was released (available on Kinopoisk and in Amediatek). In the prologue, which is about four minutes long, we see only the training room and Tony Hawk himself, the most famous skateboarder in the world. He tries, and he falls, falls, falls. Then they will show us dizzying stunts that seem fantastic, they are even scary to watch, but on the way there are these very falls, injuries, fractures. They make up a big part of this sport.

When the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was released on the very first PlayStation in 1999, it was a must-buy for any self-respecting gamer. The asceticism of the picture and the pain pouring from the screen surprisingly complemented the Russian way of life. It wasn't about the skates. It was a matter of falls, each of which could be fatal. And it was also about romance. Tony Hawk and his board were just like us. He did somersaults, took risks, tried to jump over his head. He was lonely and intoxicatingly free, and he wanted to run around on this board through the numerous levels of the game indefinitely.

At that time, we didn't know what skates meant to our peers across the ocean, although we looked at Marty with envy in "Back to the Future." But then we were surprised to find that it was about the same. This is the story, for example, of the documentary "Get Ready to Jump," which competed for the Oscar in 2018 after its triumph at Sundance. There were stories of three adults who also skated as boys, because it was unbearable at home, dangerous on the streets, and simply absurd at school. And I had to grab the board and ride it until it broke. And then on the next one, too, until it is completely worn out. A little later, in the same year 2018, Jonah Hill released a game picture "The middle of the 90s", about exactly the same thing. Apparently, the generation has grown up and wanted to reflect on their strange love for skateboards.

Soon there were remakes of old Tony Hawk games. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 was released in 2020, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 was just released five years later. Maybe for some these are new releases, but for others, we are talking about stubborn fans, this is a reason to meticulously compare the originals and remakes. There have already been a number of reviews on how the soundtrack has become impoverished, from which the super hits of AC/DC-level bands have disappeared, and which levels from the previous parts are missing here.

But for the generation that played Tony Hawk at the end of the last century, this game is both nostalgia and an attempt to figure things out. Just not in the skateboarding phenomenon, but in myself, in my past, in where that romance has gone. After all, something happened to her if part 4 of the game was released in 2002, part 5 in 2015, and then everything, only remakes in five and ten years, respectively. As if the boards are no longer needed, as if there is nowhere else to ride them, and the tricks — well, there are enough tricks and tricksters around, one is more extreme than the other. And we are not surprised that the new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 does not have a Russian translation. Those games didn't have it either, only pirated, and for the remake in the PC version, no less pirated Russification has already been done. But we played the flagship version of the game, for PS5. Shortly after its worldwide release, the Achivka distributor imported it on discs to Russia and provided us with one copy for review, thank you for that.

How Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 turned out

What can you tell me about life? Which turned out to be a long one. What can I say about the skate simulator? Which turned out to be difficult. Already at the level of the training mission, it becomes clear: there will be no concessions. Even these tasks are almost more difficult to complete in the game than on a real skateboard in real life. The skate rushes too fast, you often don't have time to react, and Tony Hawk on the screen (you can play a lot of people, but Tony has always been a priority) gets hit by a car, falls off the pier, hits the wall with his head, knees, breaks his spine, collapsing on his back from a great height.

The original Tony Hawk was quite conventional, but here the detailed space, with lighting, with a bunch of extraneous objects, with different times of the day create a space where you want to live, but it doesn't work. A skate is rolling down a mountain too fast, one Russian poet would say, reworking his own lines. There is so much beauty in this space that you want to look at it, but Tony Hawk stubbornly refuses to stand still. For him, any landscape is just a training area. We slide along the railing, jump onto the stairs, push off the wall, break the glass, kick the ball with the skate and, of course, fall. We feel Tony Hawk's pain, we get up, we rush on. Where to? To a dream, probably. But most likely — just to freedom, to flight. Someone was wondering why people don't fly like birds. They just fly like Tony Hawk.

Perhaps the realism of the new incarnation of the game made it somewhat strange to transfer the levels from the original in the sense of not the entourage, everything is fine here, but the tasks. We felt the physics, felt the gravity of the earth a hundred times, performed several flips in the air. But why, for God's sake, should we collect the word "skate" in glowing letters scattered across the levels? Does this tell us something new about our desire for freedom and flight? Perhaps, on the contrary, it mocks romance, reducing it to a primitive arcade. If I fell with the board into the melting pot of the factory floor, the glowing letters are not important to me. I want to know what it was for, and experience that feeling over and over again. I want my pain not to be in vain. I want crazy freedom and a sense of the path, I want retrospective revelations.

But Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 is as relentless as life itself. I want new levels — collect letters, figure out how to collect tens of thousands of points in two minutes. Only individual tasks are more relevant to real life, and you can forgive a lot for them. Freeing a prisoner from Alcatraz or setting off a mini-earthquake is ridiculous. Making a commotion on a skateboard in a water park is also fun. Maybe the movie studio level turned out to be a bit simple, but this is already a professional grunt, perhaps most players will like it.

And the most exciting mode remains the usual free skating without quests and missions. The board, the speed, and it's like there's nothing else. Where there is speed, there is movement. Movement is life, life is freedom. Tony Hawk gave us this feeling many years ago, it was somewhere inside all this time, and now all that remains is to pick up the joystick.