Tony Hawk's American Sk8land

Tony Hawk's American Sk8land brought to Nintendo DS the core of Tony Hawk's skateboarding series — chaining tricks into long combos, racking up style points, and completing objectives in open-ended game environments. The player explores varied locations inspired by American cities and completes mission after mission, from simple jumps to complex chains of grinds and manuals typical of the series, requiring the player to track smooth transitions between elements so the combo doesn't break.

Developer Vicarious Visions, long associated with the series' handheld entries, managed to preserve smooth, responsive controls and a legible 3D environment on the DS's limited hardware, no small technical achievement for that generation of handhelds at the time. The touch screen provides quick access to the map and certain special moves, while the core gameplay stays on classic button and d-pad controls. The soundtrack continues the series' punk and rock identity and nicely underscores the energetic atmosphere of the skater streets that the series had been building since its very first entries.

American Sk8land was received as one of the series' better handheld entries, praised for not simply trying to simplify the console original, but instead offering its own thoughtfully designed content tailored to the DS and its controls. For fans of skateboarding games it represented a solid reason to pick up the handheld console, even for those who owned one of the main consoles at home. Today it's seen as one of the more successful attempts to bring a complex action sport to a small display without the result feeling like a stripped-down compromise.