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Electrifying

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: March 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game for my grandson's birthday. He is crazy about it. My grandson is 4 yrs old.

Awesome game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I bought this for my son, who is almost 7. The game says ages 10 and up, but he picked up on it right away. He loves it, and has been playing it ALOT since we got it. My 37 year old husband loves it nearly as much! There are even a few girl skaters to select, which I've played with. The graphics aren't as good as other game systems, I think that's the general for Wii overall. Wii makes up for it with the interaction you get in these games. This game is alot of fun! It's very realistic.

Fun for young and old alike

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: September 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

My 5-year old is obsessed with the Hawkman, and so this was one of our first games for the Wii. I was a bit nervous because I've found past Tony Hawk games tricky for me, let alone for him, to master.

Imagine my delight when we started playing this. It's just outright fun: the characters are funny, the maps are cool with lots of different paths and shortcuts, the music is pretty sweet, and the gameplay is downright addictive. And best of all, my son picked it up lickety split. Heck, it's taken months of playing it before I've managed to get half as good as him at the trick courses!

It's the simplicity of the controls that makes this a perfect game when you don't want to cramp your hands or brain trying to remember some convoluted button sequence to do JUST the right move in JUST the right place at JUST the right time. And the difficulty ramps up perfectly, opening up courses of increasing difficulty and length as you go.

I've read some lousy reviews of this from magazines and critics. Glad to see some real-world players giving this game the props it deserves. Bring on Downhill Jam 2!

Blaaaaaaaaaaaah!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: July 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is the first Tony Hawk game we have played so I cannot contrast it to past Tony Hawk - I simply compare it to other wii games and console games in general. THIS ROCKS! There just is nothing like playing a video game where you become a part of the game and your motions are the boards motions. This is not some silly game where twiddling a 1/3 inch joy stick has some significance. This is a riot! The races are fun and addictive. This is the fulfillment of the wii concept. We only have a few wii games so far - but this became an instant hit and we love playing it.

("Blaaaaaaaaah") is a quote from the characters being interviewed, when you cut off their inane chatter by hitting A.

BEST tony hawk game since underground 1

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I like some of the tony hawks but after underground 1 it went DOWNHILL. This is great for rainy days or nights when you can't go skateboarding(with out hurting yourself). Plus one of the new features is racing which is the only thing tony games needed to spice the action up, cause after playing most of them (other than underground 1) the got boreing after 10 mins to 30 minites of play

Downhill. Didn't think they ment that literally.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: March 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I played this game for a few minutes. It seemed fun but you will quickly realize why it is being sold for around $30 (outside of retailers). Each race is about 1-2 minutes long which doesn't give much time to actually have fun.

Customizing your character consists of changing outfits and colors, not stats (speed, jump, balance, etc). This game honestly felt like a minigame. Perhaps fun for a little bit, but there is no real immersion into the game. All you do is race, unlock locations and race some more.

I would have given this game another star or 2 if the steering wasn't so harsh and if doing tricks was more than mashing buttons. To craigslist this goes...

Tony Hawk does SSX

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: February 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Neversoft and Activision have a soft spot for Electronic Arts and EA Big's SSX series. Their latest skateboarding and first Nintendo Wii game, Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, plays more like that downhill snowboarding title than the skateboarding franchise that propelled extreme sports into the video game industry. Though this is a tragedy in some ways, it works in others, and as a result Downhill Jam is a game that shows potential but skids to the finish line with plenty of scratches and bruises.

In the game's primary gameplay mode, different races and runs are selected and then performed. There are a lot of different events to choose from, including races, trick contests, and slalom runs. There are even special missions that ask you to do things like knock over a large number of pedestrians or cause a certain amount of damage to destructible objects. Fortunately, though the missions get a little repetitive and are sometimes too easy, there is an incentive for replaying difficult missions and earning higher ranks: new skateboards can be unlocked, and even new characters. Progressing through the game is simple enough; win a few events and you'll unlock more. It's as simple as that.

Being a Nintendo Wii game, the most important topic of discussion is control. How does Downhill Jam perform with the sideways-style Wii remote? Fair, at best. Downhill Jam isn't the hardest game on Wii to play (see GT Pro Series, Rampage: Total Destruction for that), but it also isn't very intuitive and takes far too many adjustments. For starters, all movement is controlled by tilting the remote left or right. This controls your turning, grind balancing, and spinning whilst airborne. This wouldn't be a problem if it worked consistently: depending on the player's distance to the television, control can either be too sensitive (step back!) or far too sluggish (move forward!). Tricks are pretty simple to pull off, using the 1 and 2 buttons, but the lack of manuals makes combining lines as difficult as...well, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

If the wonky controls aren't enough to turn a player away, the cast of characters and their interview-style quips at the start of each race might be. Honestly, it is difficult to think of the last time a cast was this awful! You've got stereotypes abound (a stupid, hulk-like Russian, a blonde bimbo, and punk British tomboy, for example) and all of the voice acting will have you jamming the Wii remote through your ears. Skip the interviews, you've been warned! On the plus side, Downhill Jam does feature a better Create-A-Skater than its Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 brother, Tony Hawk's Project 8, and custom skaters don't talk, avoiding any additional eardrum-burning banter.

The level design is pretty interesting. The locations include Rio, The Mall, and Rome, and each track offers some interesting shortcuts, thrilling drops, and tight turns. They're cut into sections to shorten race times, which is an interesting choice-rarely will the player ever go from the actual start to finish of any track. Grind lines and ramps lead to loads of tricking potential, and usually shave a few seconds off of the clock. SSX has it beat in level design, but it's hard not to credit Neversoft for trying.

Visually, Downhill Jam looks fine on the Wii. It certainly doesn't run poorly, though some of the textures are a little blurry, the character costumes are simple and blocky, and the bail animations are, at times, quite stiff. Still, the exciting sensation of ramping a few stories off of a broken walkway in Rio isn't held up by a spotty frame rate, so that's a big plus. The soundtrack is composed of 40 different tracks, and that's pretty impressive, but not being able to sample each song before turning it on or off is quite annoying. Also, it would have been really nice if the songs continued through loading screens and carried onto other races. Being taken out of the Lupe Fiasco groove and thrown into punky Anti-Flag stuff is an aural buzz kill.

Overall, Downhill Jam is a decent Nintendo Wii title that doesn't control poorly enough to discredit, but isn't deep or engaging enough to praise. Tony Hawk fans will most definitely want to check out Project 8 instead. Even the Nintendo DS version of Downhill Jam is a little better, but the Wii one isn't awful. SSX fans might want to try a rental to hold them over until EA Big's SSX Blur makes its Wii appearance this spring.

The kids love it!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: January 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I haven't got to play this game yet. The kids have hogged it since we got it in early January. Great game for the Wii. Except that when my wife watches the kids play, she gets motion sickness from watching the screen. That's how realistic it is.

Not a typical Tony Hawk

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: January 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

In my excitement for the Wii, I was less careful than I should have been. This is NOT a typical Tony Hawk game. It's a street race with an extremely limited selection of tricks and moves. I was expecting something much more akin to THPS/THUG. So I was very disappointed and it took me awhile to warm up to the game.

That said, it's not a bad racer. The controls take a bit of getting used to... especially if you're a THPS veteran. The levels have some decent variety and there are some very good ones, but many of them are quite bland. In racing games of this type, you get used to neat little short-cuts or even longer routes that are off the normal path, and you'll find those here, but they're very sparse (either that or extremely well hidden).

The graphics also lag behind other Wii titles like Excite Truck (a far better fantasy racing game). If you just HAVE to have a Tony Hawk game, then you probably already got this, but normal fans of either the Tony Hawk series or the Racing genre will find better options elsewhere.

Awesome game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: January 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Awesome game though the levels could have been a bit more difficult. But overall, very exciting, very enjoyable.

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