Personal Pick
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
I submit that there’s no greater feeling in videogames than finally figuring out how to enjoy a series that once eluded you. Liking games is a skill that you can get better at, and my big skill check of 2025 was learning to love Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4.
No, instead I was an annoying Skate fan who preferred to kickflip with the right stick and insisted Tony Hawk was too arcadey or unrealistic. How’s it feel to be a mega wrong dummy, teen Morgan?
Allow me to catch up: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is divine. It might be the perfect sports game and also the perfect driving game. You’re a dude standing on plywood, but you’re also an acrobatic vehicle of wicked speeds who can jump, grind, slide, and turn on a dime.
From the outside I assumed THPS was a mindless score-chaser, but that’s because I was too dumb to notice it’s also a scavenger hunt, a racing game, and a platformer all in one. It’s casual fun that slowly bleeds into a raw hunt for efficiency. And it does so while showing just as much reverence for the hobby as the grounded Skate games I obsessed over in the late 2000s.
Sure, THPS physics are exaggerated and one level involves demolishing a Los Angeles highway people are actively driving on, but the goal never wavers from the pursuit of geographic mastery through two minute sessions—the pure gratification of rolling into a foreign place and unlocking its secrets through improbable flip tricks and sickass grinds.
One nice thing about jumping straight into the 3 + 4 remake having not played much of the 1 + 2 remake from 2020 is experiencing this series at the height of Neversoft’s powers. Every elevated curb, every high drop, every camouflaged line is so thoughtfully considered and nestled into the scenery.
It would’ve been easier to make X Games-style skate parks with wooden ramps and imported rails, but 3 + 4’s playgrounds—recreated by Iron Galaxy with a loving brush—are seamlessly carved into city streets, a college campus, an airport, and literal Alcatraz Island. There isn’t a single map in the package I dislike, though I never returned to the “competition” maps that trade goals for simpler score chasing.
I know this particular remake chafed fans of the original THPS 4 by tossing out its open world structure and screwing with old maps. I hear you and your complaints are valid: It is weird that Iron Galaxy opted for forced timers on maps that didn’t have them before and got rid of interactable NPCs altogether in THPS 4. The explanations for the changes were kinda weak, and in the end it was probably a call made to speed up development, but now I want to pick up a copy of the original THPS 4 to see what I’m missing.
I assumed THPS was a mindless score-chaser, but that’s because I was too dumb to notice it’s also a scavenger hunt, a racing game, and a platformer all in one.
That said, the reworked levels play very well, and I particularly love the new maps Iron Galaxy added to the package. Waterpark is so colorful and dynamic and dense that I assumed it was a Neversoft original before my friend set me straight, and the (minor spoiler) pinball machine level unlocked at the end of the THPS 4 career is a delightfully absurd coda.
Considering the arrival of the Skate reboot and the standout indie Skate Story, 2025 turned into an unexpectedly triumphant year for virtual skating. Yet, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4’s controversial alterations led to it getting largely ignored back in July.
That’s a shame, because it carried forward the excellent work Vicarious Visions started with the 1 + 2 remake in 2020—excellent animations, a great updated soundtrack, and modernized graphics that are more concerned with performance and vibes than realism. It’s what Pro Skater would play and look like in 2025 if Activision had never abandoned the series.
If you’re grumpy about the changes, I won’t try to change your mind. But if you’re like me and missed out on the Tony Hawk fun back in the day, this is an excellent on ramp.
Read the full article here
