Downhill skateboarding is fun. That is, when you’re actually on a skateboard and tearing down a hill. For whatever the reason, the “'it' factor” that makes a fun game just isn’t there on the disc. I mean, I really enjoy taking naps on my couch too, but I wouldn’t want to play “SofaNapper ‘08.”

Considering Tony Hawk was a childhood hero of mine, this review was very hard to write. In some ways it could be seen as well constructed, but as something that aims to be a form of entertainment, it just doesn’t work.

Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam is a departure for the series that first appeared on the Wii, DS and GBA late last year. Now, it’s been transferred over to the more standard controls of the PS2, and unfortunately it still doesn’t provide much fun.

When you start the game, you can choose your character from a few very stereotypical choices like the punk or the jock, or you can choose to play as Mr. Hawk himself or create a character. The character creation is rather shallow, but works well enough. While the preset characters may remind you of generic archetypes from horrible TV shows, their personalities can actually really add something to the game. Before each race, there is a quick snippet of an “interview” with one of the characters, and while you’ll see them repeat a little too often, some of them can be quite funny. Unfortunately, after the video clips, you’ll be heading fast into the gameplay, and that’s where things literally and figuratively head downhill.

The concept of the game is really pretty basic. You’ll start at the top of a large hilly area, and head toward the bottom. Your goals will consist of objectives like races, point challenges, slaloms or hitting as many people as possible in a run. Everything is really straightforward and simple, and doesn’t make for a lot of interesting gameplay. The challenge seemed remarkably easy for the most part, and sometimes extremely inconsistent. Thanks to some odd glitches, you’ll be hitting invisible obstacles or losing control and getting completely turned around. Worst of all is when you bail out and fall off of your board. If you slam into an object or another rider takes you out, you’ve got to mash X to get back up. The problem is that the dialog that indicates you should press X is rather confusing and feels like it consistently slows you down.

You’ll not fall down often, however. In this game, unlike other Hawk games, tricks can be held up until and even through your landing. You’ll get a score based on how well you timed the landing, but it doesn’t factor in at all with your ability to stay standing. It makes even less sense when you realize that “speed wobbles” will affect your balance and punish you for traveling too fast. Yeah, going too fast in a racing game...

I had a pretty big problem with the sound mix in this game, too. As I said, the characters are pretty funny, but the levels of the audio are way off. Music in the menus is too loud, but then the voices are too low and sound effects are almost inaudible at times. On some of the videos, the sound is a great deal lower than the rest of the game, and it leads to a lot of fiddling with volume levels as you play. In the menus, I frequently found myself just selecting an event as quickly as possible to get the music, which I was really not a fan of, to stop playing.

While this game may be glitchy, it did inheret a decent control scheme. If you’ve played any other Hawk game with a Dualshock controller, you’ll know exactly what’s coming here. X to ollie, square to flip, circle to grab and triangle to grind. The L1 and R1 buttons allow for combat moves that’ll knock down other riders, and the L2 button utilizes your boost, or “zone bone” meter – which might have one of the stupidest names of any game feature ever.

Unfortunately good controls don't always equate to fun. Each event lasts about a minute or less and is followed by slow auto-saves and multiple load times. You’ll spend more time in between competitions than actually playing, and that just plain sucks. Without a real sense of excitement or speed, it ends up feeling more tedious than anything else.

One area where this title does shine is multiplayer. It’s pretty fun to bash your friends as you head downhill, and there are some cool competitive modes. However, if you’re feeling like you want to submit your friends to this game after suffering the single player experience, you’re either a sadist or a joker. While surprised by how much fun there is in the multiplayer, I wouldn't be very surprised if most players didn’t stay interested long enough to find it.

Overall, it was refreshing to see another take on this franchise, but it didn’t quite live up to what I had hoped for. If you’re looking for a great downhill racing game, our favorite is still Downhill Domination (or maybe SkiFree...). If only more developers had the guts to try something completely new like these guys did. We’d see a lot more unique titles and fewer of the clones flooding the market today. In this case though, Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam gets an A for effort, but a D for execution.