Tony, Tony, Tony... give it up, man. It’s time to retire. Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground is a total bore. You’re looking pretty good these days with your next-gen makeover and all, but plastic surgery only goes skin deep. Your muscles and bone structure are deteriorated and cracked. It’s probably time to hang up your splintered and beat-down board before tarnishing the great memories your career has provided.

You’ve failed to add anything new or exciting in Proving Ground. Career mode has been broken up, which is nice for people who might not prefer to do certain types of challenges, or for those who like to pick the order of the events they play, but none of it is all that engaging. It was a good idea to designate lines throughout the levels that players would have to hit, but going for the longer, higher difficulty ending points is more frustrating than invigorating, especially early in the game when your skater’s stats are too low to complete them.

It also doesn’t make sense that you didn’t allow gamers to access new moves like "Nail the Manual" from the beginning. They remain locked even after an hour of play. What gives? Bowl carving could have been cool, but it requires no skill and can be easily used to pad your points. Incorporating the level editor into the main world is kind of nice, but also kind of cheap since it can help you keep combos going when you probably shouldn’t, mostly due to the ability that you can push off walls in a manual to gain more speed.

The story is still annoyingly voiced by your friends and sub-par voice actors, so there’s no real drive to find out what happens next. It usually involves some phony sounding cutscene that adds little value to the experience at all. Another addition, taking pictures of your skater while playing, is slightly goofy and pretty distracting. It’s a little jarring that the angle switches as you’re doing a trick to the view of a photographer, when you’re so used to seeing behind the skater you’re controlling. The video editor is a fairly nice touch, however.

We’ve seen this trick before, Tony. All Proving Ground really does is demonstrate just how old this trick really is. It’s time for either a total reboot or time to hang the board up for good, because even series apologists will find little interesting to do here.