Welcome to our CHEATfactor Game Review of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5. We review the game and then factor in how the available cheats affect the overall game experience. For better or worse, our reviews will help you decide whether or not to use cheats when playing the game.

If you have fond memories of playing the original Tony Hawk games, trying to rekindle that with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is like trying to skateboard on an $8 board from Walmart. It starts off great but then the board cracks and the wheels come off and you're on the ground wondering why you even tried. The fact is that Pro Skater 5 isn't just bad; it's downright awful and insulting to anyone who played and enjoyed the original Tony Hawk games. As dated as they are, you're better off booting up your older games and not letting this piece of shovel ware taint your memories.

It didn't have to be this way though. Pro Skater 5 was supposed to be a throwback of sorts and more than that - a way to get the series back on track after the dismal failure of the plastic peripheral driven Tony Hawk's Ride. To be fair, it attempts to and director Robomodo had great intentions pairing the series back down to it's most basic ideas, you, your board and the motion you create together. I even found myself getting back into the rhythm I would get into when playing the older games, it's a rhythm that sadly goes to a halt very quickly thanks to terrible design choices and awful, often game breaking bugs.

To say that Pro Skater 5 is rife with bugs and glitches would be putting it mildly - the game is infested with them. Skaters are constantly go into objects randomly gltiching out into other parts of the screen and when that's not happening the game has a tendency to freeze randomly or just kick you out of missions. By now you've probably seen tons of gifs of these moments and they're hilarious, except for when they happen to you over and over again. I would constantly come close to finishing a mission only to have some strange glitch happen and not only make me restart the mission but my complete system. The fact that Activision knowingly shipped a game this broken isn't just insulting, it's unforgivable.

On top of all of this, the game just looks dated. It's hard to tell if the developers were looking for a retro look to signify the franchise going back to it's roots but either way, the game looks like an early PS3 or iPad game. Both characters and stages alike are void of any character and look like the bear minimum was put into their creation. This is a far cry from previous games in the series and even though a lot of Pro Skater 5's levels recycle content and ideas from previous games they pale in comparison to their source material. Levels aren't laid out in any sort of sensical way either and I rarely felt like there was any point in working to memorize the map to maximize my tricks.

Of course, none of that would really matter if the gameplay was the least bit fun...which it's not. Pro Skater 5 feels a lot like the classics with all of the attitude, fun and common sense taken out. The one big addition to the new game is the slam move which sends your skater rocketing down to the ground regardless of where they are. Sounds pretty simple right? Except for the fact that it's mapped to the same button as grind and there's no way to change it. I can't tell you how many times I was looking to continue a trick with a grind only to have the game slam me to the ground instead. This is really a shame when a game places so much emphasis on movement and momentum.

Aside from the content of the main game you'll be able to take part in timed challenges like destroying X number of things or putting a certain amount of tricks together. It's all so predictable and pedestrian that they would have been better off re-releasing one of the older games. Different consoles have different content like Octodad as an unlock able character in the PS4 and PS3 versions of the game and you can add skill points to customize your skater but for the life of me I didn't see one time when these stats made a difference in gameplay at all. Regardless of how many skill points I pumped into my character they still skated as fast and dumb as they did previously.

There's no reason you need to play Pro Skater 5 - none. It's a sad attempt to cash in on your nostalgia for a franchise that was once so near and dear to a lot of us but now needs to be left where it was best, in the past. Pro Skater 5 is too unfinished and too full of glitches to be worth even a bargain price, let alone the fact that the game costs $59.99. Absurdly bad, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is easily one of the worst games of the year.