Ah, the seventh installment of the legendary Tony Hawk video game series, smells like opportunity. American Wasteland(or THAW) was set to be a big game. Activision showed off the game using many ads such as giving skate demos along with promotion of their game, really hyping the no loading screen factor, and of course the first six installments were great so any Tony Hawk video game fan obviously had to try this.

The game was good however I felt it was lacking in some areas. For example, on the Classic Mode, there were only 5 levels with 10 challenges in each level, giving you 50 challenges. Now in the Story Mode there were 94 challenges. At the same time in the Story Mode there was only one level that was brand new. The rest were from other games or were similar to that of other games but, to make the game not completely boring they did expand some levels. I thought the Story Mode was less to be desired, however if your a fan of Tony Hawk, you might still like it.

The Story Mode, on the other hand was pretty solid. Its about as much as you could want from a Tony Hawk game. However one thing that really bugged me was you learned new tricks only so fast. For example, one couldn't do flatland tricks until about 30-40 challenges into it. This made it harder to combo even though I would consider doing one million flatland tricks while in focus kind of a noob combo. Another thing I found with the Career Mode was that it became repetitive as you got deeper in the story, all of the challenges seemed to be the same thing.

An even bigger problem I found, that didn't really apply to me was I thought that the normal career mode was too hard and then there was no easy. So my recommendation for anyone who has never played a Tony Hawk game, I would recommend playing Underground 2 because the story was awesome and I managed to beat both story and classic in five hours.

There were a lot of cool things in this game as well. One example of this is the fact you get to ride bmx bikes around L.A. Although they were trick to ride and I would have liked to have seen it in Classic Mode, but that's not realistic because it truly was classic because you got two minutes a run instead of THPS 4. Some of the places in L.A. were pretty cool, but I thought the Classic Mode levels could've been given a little more effort.

Overall this was a decent game. Really fun and a must play for any Tony Hawk video game fan out there. However, I do not recommend buying this game if you are good at the Tony Hawk games because I thought even though the Story Mode was hard if you're a beginner, it was still easy to me. Unless you want online play, then go buy it. I give this game a rating 7.9 out of 10, because I thought they could've done better and I felt it was a repeat of the Underground series.