I have a long history with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise. After my cousin brought his PlayStation and a copy of the first Tony Hawk game to our grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving 1999, I couldn’t save money to buy a PS1 fast enough. From there, I obsessed over Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and its direct sequels. I continued playing the series through games like American Wasteland, Project 8, and Proving Ground, but those first four games and Underground have always remained my favorites.
That’s why when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 arrived in 2020, I was elated by the quality of those remakes and their ability to replicate the feeling those games gave me two decades prior. In my review of that game, I mentioned that the franchise finally felt like it once again had a bright future, but I never envisioned it would take five years to see that potential manifest into something tangible. When the long-awaited Tony Hawk’s 3 + 4 was finally announced, I could not wait to get my hands on it. Thankfully, I had that chance this week, as Activision and Iron Galaxy invited me to spend hours playing the upcoming Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4.
Pushing Forward the Legacy
Pushing Forward the Legacy
Following the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, reports surfaced that similar remakes of the third and fourth entries were canceled following developer Vicarious Visions’ merging into Blizzard. Though it felt as though these remakes would never see the light of day, earlier this year, Activision announced it was finally happening with Killer Instinct and Divekick developer Iron Galaxy Studios at the helm.
Iron Galaxy, which had previously worked with Activision as a support studio on remaster collections like Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Spyro Reignited Trilogy, takes the lead role in this collaboration with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater publisher. “We apparently won them over with what we said we could do, what we pitched them on, and what we wanted to bring to the franchise,” design manager Mike Rossi says. “I was just as bummed when it seemed like it was, like, ‘Oh, so close. Can we get it?’ So, I’m so pumped to be able to bring this out.”
Once it was officially making Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, Iron Galaxy began considering how it wanted to approach creating the successors to Vicarious Visions’ excellent remake. “1 and 2 f—ing nailed it; they set the bar,” Rossi says. “Frankly, it was a little intimidating, to be honest. It was definitely something that’s like, ‘Okay, we have this foundation that’s really solid, so we need to take that, hit it, and exceed it.’ So, looking at that and the franchise as a whole, I think it’s fair to say it’s a staple of gaming franchises. […] We’ve got pretty high expectations to hit; that was something we had to keep evaluating ourselves.”
In particular, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is praised as one of the greatest games ever. That third mainline entry holds a 97 out of 100 aggregate score on Metacritic (including a 9.75 out of 10 from Game Informer), tying it for the fourth highest-rated game of all time among other iconic titles like Red Dead Redemption, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Galaxy. Meanwhile, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 is no slouch itself, holding a 94 out of 100 on Metacritic (including a 9.25 out of 10 from Game Informer), tying it with such titles as Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Batman: Arkham City, and Metroid Prime.
Switching Stance
Switching Stance
The team felt pressure to preserve and honor that legacy. That’s why, when it decided to make adjustments—whether minute details in an existing park or the fundamental change of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4’s career mode to follow the two-minute session format of the prior three games—it carefully considered what was best for the overall product for both new and returning players.
“We looked at 1 + 2 and thought that was captured really well and thought it was a good representation of those two,” Rossi says. “We looked at 3, and that was obviously another very highly regarded title in the franchise. So then it was, ‘Let’s look at 4. It’s quite different, but what, at its essence, is it?’ Our goal here is to make the ultimate package of 3 and 4. So ultimately, we felt that taking it into feeling more towards the 3 format, as opposed to what 4 did originally, was a better representation for a cohesive package that we were making.”
When I drill down into the decisions to make changes across both games, Rossi admits there was always anxiety when the team made the call to alter something. Still, he maintains that the team’s decisions benefited the titles as they exist in this upcoming package.
From my hands-on session, most of the changes are small in scope, such as an extra rail to open a new line for players, or beneficial quality-of-life improvements, like the ability to combo together with skitching, where the skater holds onto the back of a vehicle to gain extra speed, or customizable timers for sessions. And having spent more than 90 minutes playing the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 side of this package, I do appreciate the cohesion and feature parity that this package brings thanks to the format change.
Getting On Board
Getting On Board
Outside of that foundational change to the fourth game, the most significant addition players will notice when they fire up Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 + 4 this July will be the first all-new THPS parks in over a decade. I was skeptical when I first loaded into Waterpark; after all, replicating the design conventions while trying to recapture the parks’ magic from the original games could have easily made them feel like cheap knock-off maps. However, after playing several sessions of this new level, I was impressed by how easily you could have convinced me it was a hidden level from the original THPS 4 that I never found.
“The big thing I told the level design team was that this needs to feel like it was left on the cutting-room floor, like Activision gave us some old hard drive from 4 and we found this unfinished Waterpark level, and we brought it up to modern standards,” Rossi says. “That was always the mantra: Does this feel like this could have fit in the original game?”
That’s what stood out to me the most during my hands-on session: The soul of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games from the late ’90s and early ’00s is alive and well. Whether I was knocking a foreman into the water on Foundry, clearing branches from powerlines in Suburbia, or destroying the high-score goals on Alcatraz, the exhilaration I once closely associated with the series’ heyday came flooding back to me.
Though I was initially rusty, it soon dawned on me how re-learning to skate in a THPS game is, funnily enough, like riding a bike. After a few quick sessions to regain my bearings, I returned to my top form from when I poured dozens of hours into Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 back in 2020. It’s great to see the entire skater lineup from that exemplary remake return in this package, with several additional faces also filling out the roster. That’s not even counting the robust character creation and customization options that also come back for 3 + 4.
The immediate rush that comes from nailing a line in THPS, with on-the-fly planning, rapid improvisation, and a light-speed calculus of risk and reward, coalesces into something truly special. When you’re in the thick of a really great session, it’s impossible not to remember the magic this series once delivered every time you dropped into a halfpipe or ollied from one rail to another.
The announcement of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 excited me in ways most other game announcements in 2025 simply cannot. However, after spending several hours revisiting these glory days with old digital friends like Tony Hawk, Bucky Lasek, Bob Burnquist, and the rest of the roster, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 has become one of my most anticipated games of 2025.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC on July 11, before releasing on Switch 2 sometime this summer. In addition to local multiplayer, prospective skaters can expect eight-player online with crossplay across all seven platforms, as well as cross-platform sharing of Create-a-Park creations.
