After you get past the Extreme Sports skateboarding highlight reel, showing attitude ridden athletes performing stunts that look as death defying as they probably are, you get to the options screens. There's a career mode that allows you to make your own skater and compete against real-world stars (including Tony himself). A Single Session mode that lets you practice against the clock. A Free Skate mode that lets you simply practice to your hearts content. Three multiplayer modes that let you compete against friends online or at the same computer. And a powerful 3D Real-Time Skatepark Editor that is basically an architectural program that lets you create your own parks and levels to practice in. Already you'll find free parks to download at various fan-sites thus adding to the replay value of the game.
Controls are smooth and fluid, the best option by far being a gamepad. You want lots of buttons and you'll want to study the controls to maximize the learning curve. Sadly, there isn't any kind of tutorial to help you learn how to do things and, for players new to this button-mashing/combo/creativity style gameplay the initial frustration factor is daunting. Also, the game follows that console game convention of locking almost everything until you're good enough to unlock the better parts of the game. PC game players don't like this and don't want this and it's made more egregious by the fact that only one skate park, the hanger, is open at first. It'll take clumsier (read: older) players a long time before they can see what else the game has to offer and this seems unnecessary on the PC.
Once you do unlock the various parks, usually through performance in Career mode, you'll get to grind in parks themed after Venice Beach, a Mexican Bullring, the bustling streets of the Big Apple and even a park in Marseilles, France.
While the graphics aren't quite as sharp and optimized as the PC is capable of displaying, they are still quite pretty and very inventive. Loads of obstacles, railings, steps, half-pipes and other things to jump, grind and sail over. Animations are flawless during the various moves and you'll find that landing and balance become instinctive after a while. On slower PCs there is a little bit of slowdown during the more complex tricks, but it isn't a huge problem. Once you get the hang of the controls play moves at a frenetically brisk pace and you won't mind so much having to restart after a bloody looking facial crash, you'll relish the second chance in fact.