Vicarious Visions have a dubious reputation with many videogames press agencies. Often taking the role of handheld developer to Activision’s in-house home console brands, Vicarious Visions have made few home console projects; DOOM 3 and Crash Nitro Kart being the only two in recent memory. The team have been responsible for all the Game Boy Advance conversions of the Tony Hawk’s series thus far, as well as the NintendoDS Launch title – Spider-Man 2. With all the history the team has, some of us at Electronic have developed a small contrary affection for the company, and hope that they can do justice to a new Tony Hawk’s title, on a new system.

            Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land immediately distances itself from its home console comrades with a slight name-change. In addition to this, the graphical style has had an overhaul; the title is cel-shaded.

Entering Story Mode is the first option available after creating your avatar from a handful of heads, shirts and trousers. The Level design is clearly reminiscent of the series’ earlier outings on the PlayStation and Nintendo64, with each Level being a self-contained environment of ramps, rails and walls. The Touch Screen displays a Map for the best-part of the title; incredibly handy when playing Story Mode, as the objective is simply to skate to one of the AI characters displayed in silhouette on the Map and complete the Goals they give you. Levels usually consist of around seventeen Goals, although not all will have to be completed before moving onto the next arena. The main objective of Story Mode is to re-build a disused Skate-Park, which is activated when you complete specific Goals or when you access the Skateshop. New pieces must be placed to create your own park and the game will give you a selection of three pieces to be placed in the area you’re viewing. Selecting a piece you can afford with the readies you’ve collected by completing the public’s Goals can be performed on the Touch Screen; you can then view the park simply by skating through it at any point.

Each of the areas link to another and, once unlocked, you may travel through from one area to another – a seemingly pointless feature when each area can be accessed immediately from the in-game Menu, but one that may have been sited in order to bring some consistency between handheld and home console counter-parts. The Story Mode is treated as the main gameplay mode in the title; however, with the option to skip straight to the Goals, it shouldn’t take any experienced Tony Hawk’s gamer more than a day to get through the major objectives, with a second to tie-up the loose ends. Contrary to this is the Classic Mode. Giving Goals relating to those seen in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater editions, Classic Mode is more about ardent challenge than self-perpetuating tricks. Working through the same arenas seen in Story Mode, the Goals are decidedly different and feature the classic “Collect S-K-A-T-E” and other formulaic skating challenges.

The Touch Screen is used to limited effect in Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land. Similarly to Vicarious Vision’s first NintendoDS outings, the features show all the hallmarks of being brilliant ideas or touches, without the scope to be fully explored. A new feature is the Freak Out available when either standing-still or stacking a huge combo; upon landing, three bars will appear on the Touch Screen, and touching them when at their peak will execute a freakier Freak Out and gain more points. Obviously, the deck customisation takes place on the Touch Screen and can easily be related to Microsoft Paint.

The Multi-Player Modes offer some nice competitive challenges, but do require a fair amount of previous knowledge of the title in order to compete. Playing Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land online, as the first online NintendoDS title to be released in the UK, is as pure an example of Nintendo’s flawless hardware as the Analogue Stick. No lag, no glitches and no problems - seamless – something that EA should probably stand-up and take note from, before insisting that their online NintendoDS titles feature on their own network in a similar fashion to their XboxLIVE! escapades.

Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land is a very smooth title. Featuring the speed and fluidity of its home console brethren, the cel-shading technique has obviously been used to create such a fluid world with maximum ease and minimal bugging. With very few pre-constructed worlds in this vein having appeared on the NintendoDS as of yet, it’s very hard to place the title alongside the likes of Super Mario64 DS without realising that the games featured on the NintendoDS so far have certainly lacked the traditional views of videogames far more than any of us expected, and probably suspect currently – with the myth of home console conversions with Touch Screen features tacked-on remains solidly at the forefront of our minds. However, Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land does itself justice through a lack of breaking boundaries. It’s in a league of its own because, until it was released, that league simply didn’t exist. The sound quality on the other hand, is quite obviously average. A couple of Midi-versions of Pop-Punk tracks doesn't make low-grade sound software sound any better.

Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land is a fantastic skating game. Using the NintendoDS’s graphical prowess to create a portable version of a classic Nintendo64 skating game is recognition enough, but Vicarious Visions have gone even further. With the online features, limited “create-a-” options and some challenges that require a distinct level of skill impacted with often impeccable Level design, Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land ushers itself into a respectable vision of what the NintendoDS can do with classic gameplay structure and proves that as lovely as innovation is, there’s still plenty of life in bringing full-scale gameplay to gamers on-the-go.