In Project 8 everything is about getting to the top, to get a place as one of the best 8 skaters that are picked by Tony himself. Eating a lot of corn flakes but even more practising and completing missions is the task. These missions you'll know from previous versions, you'll have to do tricks in front of a photographer, finish a grind track and so on. Innovating is that you can choose the difficulty degree on each mission.

You won't have to go through the standard difficulties but will be able to choose how far you want to go this time. If you're good in grinding but less in tricks, you can do the latter on easy while the first on hard. Or the other way around of course.

The world has been enlarged again compared to the last time and there are no more loading times, everything is close together and you won't have to go through long tunnels to hide any loading. To access this huge world you will have to do something like do a wall ride on a gate to unlock a skate park or do other, trickier, things to unlock a school or other parts of the city.

The opening of new areas is a mission on itself so you don't need to get monster scores to unlock them. But the big innovation isn't in the locations or missions but the tricks themselves. Next to the classic controls you now also have to possibility to do tricks up close in some sort of slow motion effect where you get to control your feet with the joysticks on the controller.

This is a very cool function that looks extremely easy for the simple tricks but once you start doing the hard stuff you'll seriously have to watch out not to loose your board halfway. So the controls are more than good and there's even better news. The horrible mini-games are out! It's again all about skating, skating and skating. It was about time as we were getting close to having a Tony Hawk Series that would become a GTA-clone.

Graphically, Tony Hawk doesn't like like Saint's Row. Project 8 looks hair sharp with a lot of fun water and lighting effects and a serious drawing distance and high framerate. And we were only checking out the preview version!