The Wii is an amazing system. This however, isn't an amazing game.

Tony Hawk Downhill Jam for the Wii, is another addition to the Tony Hawk series, which happens to be one of my favorites. When I played Project 8, I thought it was smart how they changed up the way to game played. When you play Downhill Jam, you just think it's a little bit weird that they made this game and feels a wee bit rushed.

Downhill Jam is the first Tony Hawk game that really only gives you regular people as players, not skate pros. They give you a majority of different guys to play as and each of them have different stats. Before every match, you get some kind of interview with a player that is in the race, and it is totally unnecessary, and the player just kind of describes the relationship he or she has with the other players.

The game is in the spirit of the older Tony Hawk games in the past's downhill levels. All the levels start at a big quarter pipe and have you race down the level trying to get to the end. As you race to the bottom, you are going to be grinding, ollying, and doing tricks over things. There are many short cuts in different races and it has that feeling of connectiveness like the old Tony Hawk games. Everything seems to be connected, but doesn't feel like they really put it all together right because sometimes you will ollie from one thing to another, and they strung it up wrong so there is no way to avoid going out of bounds and then usually getting last place in the race.

The game feels a lot more arcady than any of the games in the past. Instead of doing tricks for points, you really aren't going to be doing very many tricks. The direction pad controls what kind of flip trick and grab you do, but unfortunately, you aren't going to have enough time usually to think about what kind of grab you do.

Tony Hawk Downhill jam is one of the shortest Tony Hawk games ever, which is saying a lot because there have been some really short Tony Hawk games. There are only a few levels, and these levels are spread out through a few tiers. In these tiers, you will be playing the same levels over and over again, in different races. The levels really only take about a minute or two to get through every time. If you wanna zoom through the game, it'll probably take you 3-4 hours minutes tops if you zoom through a level and get third, you get a bronze medal. If you get first you get a gold medal. You probably will spend about 5-6 hours getting gold on every level.

As you beat more levels, you get more skateboards, and the skateboard increase your stats. The levels are so easy to beat that you'll be able to get more boards in no time, and it's almost skilless to get more boards.

If you consider yourself a Tony Hawk veteran, and play this, your gonna stink it up as someone who has never played the series before. Using the Wii remote definitely gets a lot of getting used to. Tilt the remote to the left to go left, and tilt right to go right. If you tilt it too much to the left or right, your guy won't turn at all, and sometimes when you have to make a really sharp turn, your going to end up going into the wall. I really had high hopes for using the Wii remote for this game because all of the previews made it look so easy, but in the end, you're going to want to use the d-pad for turning. To do flip tricks and grinds you press the "1" button, and press "2" to ollie and do grab tricks. You can also flips by tilting up and down. Balancing on a rail works great and is done by tilting the Wii remote. The trick scheme will also take a while to get used to, but after a little while, it'll come naturally to you.

This is the first Tony Hawk racing game, and it really feels like what SSX would feel like if it got ported to the Wii. Since you are in a race, tricks don't count for points, but you use them to gain boost. When you do tricks your boost meter gets filled up on the side of the screen, (just like in SSX), when your boost is ready to be used, shake your Wii remote and your guy goes significantly faster. Since the game feels like your about to crash at all times, boosting just makes it easier to crash, and when you shake your Wii remote, it's hard not to tilt it, and you are likely to crash just while shaking it.

There are 9 characters in the game, and they each are very animated and have their own story, but that doesn't mean that the story mode is differen't every time you play it with a different character. The skaters are:
Tony Hawk: Do I even need to describe who this is?
Budd: Earthy, out there, and sounds like he's in the middle of a dream.
Ammon: Sportsman that wants to dominate another sport.
MacKenzie: Tough girl that is great at combat and just wants to gets into fights.
Kyla: Preppy singer girl that wants to get reckognized through skateboarding to get into the music business.
Gunnar: Cheesy big muscular guy that constantly uses outdated hip-hop lingo .
Tiffany: Stuck up rich girl.
Jynx: Goth girl
Crash: Total skater guy who is fearless and reckless, who likes the pain that comes with skateboarding.

The game is the most unrealistic Tony Hawk ever, the riding is nothing like Project 8, or really any of the other Tony Hawk games. You go extremely fast, you get absolutely gigantic air that surpasses any extreme sports game out there, and you do just absolutely ridiculous special tricks. You can just be skating and randomly do a front flip grab. You can power slide at 50 miles an hour, which would obviously make you crash in real life. A big strategy in the game is punching skaters, or even pedestrians, that get in your way.

The game feels out of control at all times, but remains fun and doesn't get repetitive because you can get gold in a variety of places and the levels have so many different ways of traveling through them. This is really the first Tony Hawk that I would not recommend going out and buying right away, I would just suggest a rental of this one.

The graphics in the game are really not up to the Wii's capabilities, but they aren't horrible. Like the older ones, they are cartoony, but they still look okay. The levels have quite a few different textures and a whole lot of different buildings, but still, everything looks like Tony Hawk American Wasteland, or even Underground 2 on the Playstation 2. The game does look quite smooth, but there are some lazy, and pixelated textures.

There is a soundtrack of over 40 songs, and some of them are quite good, and they sound great! I'll be honest, and I'm quite surprised, that there are a lot of different voiceovers in the game by the different characters, and usually they attempt to be funny but fail, but still, they are done quite well. There are the basic noises in the game, such as the sound of a skating crash or the sound of the ollie, but there are very few noises in the game and most of them are recycled from older games. The sounds that the Wii remote makes are very simple, like the sound of an ollie, but it always sounds really tinny and slightly distorted due to the cheap microphone that the Wii included.

Overall, it's a fun game, but it's really not worth paying the $50 to get because it is so short. There is multiplayer that is pretty fun, but there are only 10 tracks, and they are all really small, consisting of about a minute a track each, making the game feel so short and pretty rushed for what it offers. So should you buy this game? No. Should you rent this game? Yes!