Tony Hawk's American Wasteland was a really good addition to the Tony Hawk stable of games. It provided a neat story, some excellent presentation, and a return to the skating goodness that the Tony Hawk games have been renown for, but seemed to be lacking in the Underground series. For example, THAW removed the clumsy vehicles found in THUG 1 & 2 and replaced them with the BMX, and put it in as an optional mode of transport rather than requiring it to be utilised in any given mission.

THAW put the emphasis back onto skating, but still retained the fun parts of THUG, namely the opening up of levels through demolition. Enter the Xbox 360, and THAW is released as a launch title. Unfortunately, it's a straight port of the Xbox version. To that end, it wouldn't hurt for you to check out our review of THAW on Xbox, because I'm not going to re-hash everything we said back then. There are a few minor alterations and some control reconfiguration, but in terms of content the game is identical. But first, lets talk about the minor 'improvements'.

The graphics do look a little better, a little cleaner and higher res, and the models and animation looks more refined, which is a good thing, as sometimes the Xbox version looked a little too blocky and jumpy, akin to the PS2. But unfortunately there's some noticeable side effects of porting still low resolution textures into the game. For example, when the camera is at a certain angle, the sky flashes to a lighter colour, and sometimes the light shafts from a lamp will suddenly go a solid white. It's only very occasional, but it is very noticeable. Also, the glow around items often appears very low res, whilst the surrounding background looks good, creating really ugly looking on-screen artifacts. Whilst the colours of the game appear brighter overall, when you get close to a wall, sign, or other textured object things can look downright ugly.

With the redesigned Xbox 360 controller, the black and white button functionality has been replaced by the top shoulder buttons, and this makes it much easier to pull off tricks such as wall runs, caveman, and so forth. If anything, the xbox 360 controller makes the game easier to play as it feels far more responsive – tricks I had a bit of trouble pulling off in the original version seem a lot easier now. Admittedly that could be because I've played it all before, but even in the classic modes I was getting much more air and reaching the special bonuses in 2 or 3 goes instead of 10.

Of course the Xbox 360 version also adds the Gamerscore Achievements system, of which there are 45 to unlock. It's pretty easy to rack up some easy Gamerscore points here if that's your thing, but it certainly isn't enough to compel you to replay the game a 2nd time if you beat it once already on Xbox.

But, apart from those minor things, this game is exactly the same as the xbox version. The story, the tricks, the game modes, the music are all pretty much identical, and the graphical improvements are so minor that it is all but unnoticeable. Look at the two versions side by side on a normal television and you would be hard pressed to tell which is which. Furthermore, I had crashes that did not occur on the xbox version. It seemed to be random, but occurred most often when I hit the start button to pull up the menus, such as the messages and the save menu. This did not endear me to the game either.

I would really love to talk about the online functionality, but unfortunately every time I hit connect I couldn't get a game. I'm not sure if it's because no one is playing it anymore, or if there was something up in my connection settings, but I have played other games without a problem, so I just suspect most people are over playing this game online. This isn't at all surprising given how long the game has been available in the USA and Europe.