It's hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the arrival of the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, the seminal skateboarding game that single-handedly launched the action sports genre. Its underground flavor, tight play mechanics and free-form gameplay kept it in my game rotation for a long time, and I still identify it as one of the defining experiences of the 32-bit generation. What is even more difficult to believe is that the developers, Neversoft, have released as many Tony Hawk games in that four year span. Each has brought something unique to the basic Tony Hawk formula without causing the franchise to grow stale, an accomplishment that few other sagas can claim.

But pulling off such a feat year after year is a daunting task, and it seems like the weight of putting out yet another Tony Hawk game has finally caught up with the folks at Neversoft. The latest iteration, Tony Hawk's Underground, is a solid entry into the long-running skateboarding series that offers a fresh perspective on the tried-and-true structure of the action sports game. But in the process of reinventing the series, it has become painfully evident that a years' worth of development time just wasn't enough to faithfully bring that vision to life. While still a fair bit of fun, the game is plagued with a host of presentation and control problems that are very uncharacteristic of this industry-leading property.

Tony Hawk's Underground (also known as THUG) takes the basic premise of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 and layers a rags-to-riches storyline on top of it. The games' Story Mode takes the place of the traditional Career Mode and marks the biggest departure from past titles. Instead of playing the role of one of the games' professional skateboarders, THUG requires you to create your own skater that you'll take through 27 chapters of story-driven skating gameplay. You'll end up doing many of the same things you did in THPS4, but the addition of the storyline gives you a bit more incentive to play through what ends up being a very similar game.

Before you hit the asphalt you will need to create a skater that serves as an alter ego of yourself. You can make a male or female skater and deck them out in just about any type of outfit you can imagine, much like Tony Hawk 4. The amount of options you have available is absolutely staggering and lead me to tinker around for several hours, though I was hard pressed to create a female skater who was even remotely attractive. Of course, I have to tip my cap to any game that lets me play as a guy wearing a top hat and a monocle. Classy! You can also design your own board using a wealth of cool graphic decals too. When you're satisfied with your handiwork you can enter Story Mode, which starts you off in the armpit of America, otherwise known as New Jersey.

Your buddy Eric Sparrow will help introduce you the new game mechanics, the most notable of which allows you to get off of your skateboard and explore on foot. This is a long overdue addition that lets you slow down the pace of the game and allows you to truly appreciate the detail of the environments. You can work this "caveman" move into a combo provided the on-screen timer doesn't run out. Additionally, you can climb buildings and explore areas that you wouldn't be able to find on a skateboard. The downside is that the controls are very sketchy and are nowhere near as tight as the skating mechanics, leaving you with a lot of trial and error for what should be easy tasks. Regardless, it's a cool feature that opens up a lot of options.

Once you're back on your board you can start skating around to scope out the best lines. The core skating mechanics remain virtually unchanged from the last game and feel as tight and responsive as ever. Putting together a string of great-looking skating moves is ridiculously easy, and the methods available for linking combos ensures that you always have a way to continue your trick string. The levels are as large and expansive as ever, absolutely jam-packed with real world objects just waiting to be sessioned. Skating around and pulling off tricks is still a fun activity, and there are so many ways to do so that Tony Hawk veterans will likely find themselves playing into the wee hours of the morning.

The story will take you from New Jersey to Moscow, with stops in diverse places like Hawaii, Tampa and Vancouver along the way. The game is divided into chapters, and progressing to the next one requires fulfilling a number of different skating goals. Like THPS4, goals are handed out by non-player characters stationed throughout each level. Early goals are quite simple and serve to introduce you to the walking and driving mechanics. Later goals should be very familiar if you've played a Tony Hawk game before and include skating a line in a single combo, item collecting, performing a string of tricks in a timed run or the beating the traditional high score. You've done most of this stuff before, but the excellent level design and on-foot exploration makes it compelling nonetheless.

The Story Mode keeps things interesting throughout, but this also ends up being the games' biggest weakness in the long run. For one thing, the presentation suffers mightily during the story scenes, with awful character graphics, loads of clipping errors and some mediocre acting efforts. And the heavy-handed "keep it real" storyline paints skateboarding as a soap opera filled with betrayal and revenge, and makes me wonder how Tony Hawk could have possibly endorsed it. On the plus side though, it's great to see Stacy Peralta in the series (finally), and his presence makes me pine away for a retro Zephyr Team-style skating game. That probably won't happen, as kids are probably more interested in busting Indy 900s rather than Bertleman Slides.

THUG contains the standard create-a-park mode that behaves like you'd expect, but for the first time you can create your own tricks. The timeline-based editor enables you to add air tricks (grab and flip), set their duration and then spice them up by adding rotation and flips. You can easily preview your trick and refine it to perfection, as well as store any number of unique tricks on your memory card. The only downside is that you're limited to tweaking pre-existing tricks, and you can't create your own manual or grind tricks. Bummer. Still, it's a neat option that can yield some interesting results should you get tired of the standard repository of tricks. You can also unlock a cool deck editor once you've completed certain requirements.

In keeping with the theme of the game, Neversoft has completely changed how you gain statistic points. Instead of collecting icons or completing goals, you must perform certain skating moves to improve your skills. For instance, you might need to grind a rail for 5 seconds to add 1 point to your Rail Balance statistic. Some of these conditions can get very challenging; I had a tough time grinding for 20 seconds to get that last Rail Balance point. To prevent you from getting too good too quickly, you need to be an amateur and, later on, a professional to improve your stats further. The system makes a world of sense and is a much better method than anything the series has done before.

In addition to the on-foot gameplay, some of the new goals require you to drive a variety of vehicles including sports cars, leaf blowers and golf carts. While this probably seemed like a natural way to add variety and depth to the game on paper, the results leave a lot to be desired. For starters, the driving controls are absolutely wretched and pale in comparison to the refined skating mechanics. There is no real sense of control or physics; maneuvering around the levels isn't a whole lot of fun and quickly becomes tedious. Furthermore, most of the driving goals have little bearing on the overall storyline, and those that do will likely leave you scratching your head. Why would your sponsor want footage of you smashing pineapple stands in a rusty old car for their skating video? Simply put, the driving is a weak, unfun addition that I sincerely hope is removed in the next game.

The visuals are nearly identical to those in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, so veterans should pretty much know what to expect. The environments are well-designed (from a skating standpoint) and offer a wide variety of realistic-looking objects to session. The Vancouver level is particularly impressive as it sports a variety of terrain changes, outdoor hockey rink, a hotel you can enter and an adjacent stadium with a full skatepark setup inside. The character animation is still excellent, but the detail on the pro skaters seems to curiously be getting worse over the years. The faces, while undoubtedly resembling their real-life counterparts, are extremely crude, and the less said about the gnarled hands and gruesome feet the better.

Sound is about what you'd expect from a Tony Hawk game, with a large number of effects and voice samples carried over from previous titles. There's not really a whole lot to say here, except that the Dolby Pro Logic II support makes everything sound nice and crisp. The soundtrack ups the ante with over 70 songs, and many of the acts you'll recognize from past games. You can customize your playlist, and even organize it according to genre (rock, punk or hip-hop). You can do this at anytime without the need to buy songs (I'm looking at you, SSX 3). And finally, Neversoft has implemented a way for you to see what song is playing without the horrendously annoying EA Trax: the artist and song are displayed in the Pause menu. Brilliant.

The game possesses a number of other thoughtful features, such as on-screen text that informs you when you clear certain requirements. This is accompanied by a handy chime, so you can gain credit for that 20 second grind before you bail. Nice touch. The games' interface is generally clean and attractive, and menus are organized in an easy-to-navigate manner. Additionally, you can choose from a number of stylish interface themes, toggle on-screen meters on and off, and watch all of your movies (both skating videos and sponsor commercials) from the options screen. And in a bid to make the game truly personal, you can even upload a digital photo of yourself into the game and paste it onto your created skater. I wouldn't try it with my own monsterous visage, but the results I've seen are fairly competent.

And now a quick word about advertising. I think it's cool that skating companies like Birdhouse and Element have promotional videos in the game that advertise their stuff. It fits with the theme of the game and helps promote awareness of skating culture. But I have to scoff at the heavy presence that the rock band KISS has been given in this game. They not only have a song in the soundtrack, but Gene Simmons is included as an unlockable skater, and worse still, the secret stage is actually a KISS concert. Since when is KISS so entrenched in skating culture that they deserve such shameful plugging? Hidden characters are one thing, but this multi-threaded advertising blitz is downright sickening. Of course, I can't decide if this is worse than having to railslide through a Honda Element in SSX 3.

In the end I enjoyed Tony Hawk's Underground, as it contains the same great gameplay that I've loved from the very beginning. But the formula is starting to feel dated, as the skating mechanics and visuals have hit a plateau that is unlikely to be surpassed this generation. I appreciate Neversoft's attempt to infuse the genre with a bit of story telling, but I'm not convinced that this is the way to go for future games. And it must be said that I'm starting to tire of playing a new Tony Hawk game every year when I've barely had time to master the one that came before. I hope that the team takes a year off to truly reinvent the skating game, as a few extra months of development time could make THUG 2 really shine.