The Tony Hawk series doesn't seem to make any bones about its repetitive nature, so it's fortunate for the franchise that the design of the games affords it the ability to provide so much new by doing so little. Neversoft has done great to maintain level design that is consistently deep enough to give incentive to explore, and the gameplay alone grants enough of an addictive element that you're actually going to want to. When American Wasteland was released, it changed the formula quite a bit for the Tony Hawk series by delivering an open world to wander, and now Tony Hawk's Project 8 aims to redefine the elements of the series by taking the open-ended element and re-inventing it with what distinguished the games in the first place: solid skateboarding.

Tony Hawk's Project 8 borrows the same format as American Wasteland. There's a huge environment (completely streamed in real-time) to explore with your own customized characters, more portions of it becoming available the further you progress in the game, with tons of stuff to do as you make your way from a skate wannabe to a part of Tony Hawk's crew. Though Project 8 has a general semblance of a plot to connect the different elements of the game, the narrative has been stripped down a great deal to allow more of a focus on increasing your talents as a skater and participating in various challenges.

The most prominent addition overall are the skating mechanics themselves. Your character now has the ability to perform kickflips, which are handled in a sensationalist fashion by the game going into slow-motion and the controls of each foot are handled by the left and right analog controls, respectively. You kick and rotate the board with each stick, in mid-air, and the more your able to pull off obviously increases and adds to the combo meter. Conceptually it looks and sounds like a cool implementation, but unfortunately we'll have to wait for a hands on before we can see how effective an addition it will be.

Tony Hawk's Project 8 is enabled with a physics engine that provides more of a real-world dynamic to the skating mechanics. Half-pipes and jumps now have the influence of gravity to take into account, and additionally different grades will affect the speed and momentum of your skater. Coasting downhill before hitting a jump will provide for a noticeable boost, as well as have an effect on certain tricks that rely on balance such as manuals and grinds. Your character also gets the rag-doll treatment, which means that when you bail you're going see and hear all of the gratifying cracks and hits as they get tossed all over the place.

The environments are littered with tons of distractions. New to the arena are the chalk challenges, which are sequential markers (similar to the C-O-M-B-O letters) that are spread out in a manner that requires a bit of proactive exploration and experimentation to find them. They may start low to the ground, and depending on their level of difficulty may finish with you grinding across the second story lip of a building. Additionally, there are photo goals and a build-a-trick mode in which you create your own setup by placing objects wherever and however you want. There is also Classic Mode, which has you doing the traditional ten objectives in two minutes from the Tony Hawk games of yore.

Xbox Live integration will take advantage of the leaderboards, using the goals and challenges completed in-game to run your tally. Fitting, since half the fun of Tony Hawk is comparing what kind of ridiculous score tallies you can rack up against other players. Portions of the game like Classic Mode, as well as the various goals and objectives distributed throughout the rest of the game, will all be tracked and published for all to see and laugh at via Xbox Live.

Tony Hawk's Project 8 shouldn't have any problems offering up what fans of the series were looking for with the rushed American Wasteland released at launch with the Xbox 360. It looks like it has just the right mix of new additions to compliment the familiar modes that players have grown so fond of, and for die-hard fans of the series the gameplay of Tony Hawk really just never gets old. Still scheduled for Fall 2006 release, be sure to check back then for when we give it the review treatment.