Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland from 2005 by Neversoft brought a major innovation to the series - a seamless open world of Los Angeles with no loading screens between districts. For the first time, the player could also walk around off the skateboard, hop off it and hop back on, which made it possible to connect classic skateparks, streets, and underground tunnels into a single continuous map without interruption.

The Xbox version benefited from the console's power for smooth streaming of the sprawling city with no visible transitions between areas, a technical rarity among skateboarding games in 2005. The storyline, featuring a custom-created rider who moves to Los Angeles and seeks recognition in the local skate scene, ties the individual missions into a continuous whole instead of separate levels picked from a menu, as in previous installments of the series. Also added was a system for building ramps on the fly using the Spine Transfer ability, an improved grinding system, and an expanded Create-A-Park editor with new elements.

As their own created rider, the player could also visit enclosed spaces such as an abandoned warehouse or the sewers beneath the city, reachable only on foot without the skateboard, a novelty for the series. The story offered several branching missions where the player could choose which crew of skaters to join, affecting the available side quests and the development of relationships between characters. The game also introduced improved fall animations that reacted more accurately to the rider's speed and angle of impact than in previous installments of the series. The soundtrack again drew on the punk and hip-hop scenes and complemented the atmosphere of free movement through the city, which, unlike previous installments, made the game feel more like a lifestyle in an open city than a sequence of separate challenges.

Why play it: For fans of the series who appreciate the shift to an open city and a connected story instead of picking levels from a list - a turning point in the series before its later move toward even bigger open-world installments.