Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 launched last week, and I’m fairly sure I’ve been able to hear the sound of hundreds of skaters shredding their 50-50 grinds down rails and doing Weddle grabs over the weekend. However, it’s worth pointing out some of the assist options that are available in the game.
While Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 doesn’t have an accessibility area, it does have assists that are listed under the “Game Mods” area found in the options menu. From here you can enable five different assists as you see fit to help make your experience with the skateboarding arcade game a comfortable one.
Perfect Rail Balance will lock the horizontal balance bar for grinding, ensuring you never bail from a grind unless of course you jump off and land at an angle. Perfect Manual Balance means you can perform a manual without having to worry about balancing a vertical balance bar. And there’s Perfect Lip Balance for those you like doing balance tricks at the top of a ramp.
There’s also an Always Special assist which means your special meter is continually filled rather than requiring you to successfully perform tricks to fill it. And there’s an option to allow No Bails, which essentially means you’ll never fall off your board, even if you land a Heelflip wrong.
Having these assists activated will mean you won’t qualify for online leaderboard positions, but it won’t affect you achieving goals and challenges in-game. For example, I was able to complete a “Sick Score” goal with the balance assists on and progress through the single-player story.
Outside of the assists, there are general options such as invert camera controls. As for control schemes, these are all presets and baked into the game without the ability to remap anything.
You can enable subtitles. Subtitles appear for any spoken dialogue, this includes when Tony Hawk is explaining something to you in a tutorial, or when a car driver is hurling abuse at you after running you down. The subtitle presentation isn’t the best and comes with a lacking outline/drop-shadow and a thin font, but it’s worth considering that these spoken dialogues appear rarely.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One at current.
