Face-Off: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

[Administrator]

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 should have been a triumphant send-off for the beloved, highly popular franchise. Instead, what has been delivered is an experience that feels unfinished, unpolished and in no fit state for release. Filled with multiple bugs and lacking optimisation, the birdman's latest - and most likely final - game suffers from numerous issues ranging from characters clipping through scenery, stuttering music and cinematics, along with noticeable texture streaming issues. With the Tony Hawk license due to run out at the end of this year it seems likely that developer Robomodo had to work to an extremely tight deadline to get the game out on time, resulting in a product that really needed a few more months of development before it was ready for release.
Unsurprisingly, there is a hefty 6GB patch available to download at launch, in addition to the 7.8GB of data directly installed directly from the disc itself. There have been reports that the main missions remain locked until this patch has been installed, but we found that this is not the case: the core missions, along with the 'create a park' and tutorial modes are all available right off the disc without having our consoles hooked up to an Internet connection. The day one patch is something of a necessity though, particularly on PS4, as it improves the stuttering opening logo cinematics, the slow streaming of textures and smoothes out the frame-rate to a certain degree during gameplay. Meanwhile, on Xbox One, the update adds an opening video consisting of skateboarding clips present on the pre-patched PS4 version. However, beyond this we see hardly any difference in other areas before and after the update is applied.
To illustrate, it takes between 15-30 seconds for high resolution assets to load on Xbox One, with blurry areas easily visible across parts the ground, walls, and half pipes - something the patch doesn't seem to fix. Matters are improved on PS4 - all assets usually resolve on-screen within a few seconds once the patch is installed. The way the game deals with streaming assets after a location is loaded also appears to have a noticeable impact in performance on Xbox One too. Frame-rates are more severely affected while blurry artwork is on-screen, and we suspect that streaming in assets during gameplay is causing a noticeable performance bottleneck.
Read more…


More...