Intro

I won't say I came into "Frank Hawk" thinking I was going to fall in love with it. After all, the available images you can see for this game were rather ugly in my eyes, but I thought I'd give this endless runner whose name is obviously a call back to the countless Tony Hawk games that were made over the years a shot. After all, a game might look like crap but still be enjoyable in other ways. Unfortunately "Frank Hawk" suffers from some major gameplay issues that can make beating this game an absolute nightmare in my opinion, but I suppose I'll discuss my thoughts on the narrative before I dig into the meat and potatoes of this review.

Story

You play as Chozu a skater who likes to complete obstacle courses set up by his friends who reward his success with tacos. Which really doesn't seem like that much of a reward when failure results in burning to death in hot lava. You'd think a guy that lives by the rules of "Skate or Die!" would be asking for much better compensation.

Gameplay

This game is an endless runner as such your forced to always run full tilt to the right until you reach the end of the level, but this can lead to some serious issues since some of the platforms are impossible to duck under, but you can't jump over them either if your in the wrong position. In other words you can get hopelessly stuck.



And since the game doesn't have a button for manually resetting a level or allow you to back up so you can try again your only option is to shut down the game and start over from the begging.

To make matters worse the hit detection in this game is very wonky as well.



As we can see in the above gif I actually do manage to make a clean jump between the character's friend and his deadly projectile, but this action still results in a game over.

To make things weirder you can sometimes jump off of the air in this game. I'm not sure if this is because Chozu is permitted to jump once regardless if he's contact with the ground or what. Albeit you can sometimes make a jump and then jump off of the air before appearing to make contact with the ground as well, but I'm too lazy to go digging through my footage to look for an example of that at the moment. And it would probably eat up more space in my locker box than I'm willing to commit to this game anyway.

And in the third stage Chozu sometimes fails to make a proper jump if he's bumping into his friend on that stage. This can result in you falling to your doom, but that's more of a minor annoyance in comparison to the issues I ran into the 4th stage. In fact, I've never gotten past that stage since I always find myself getting stuck at the same point shown in my gif. I suppose if practiced the game enough I might be able to eventually memorize where it's at, but this game probably isn't worth the effort to beat.

Graphics and Sound

On the sound side of things the game makes use of midis of songs that were used in "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" or "Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX". And while the music choices feel very appropriate considering the inspiration for this game.

Graphically the game feels very lazy with your friends somehow just magically floating in the air. And Chozu's skateboarding animation is the stuff of legends. In other words the man can somehow pick up speed and jump without ever using his legs or knees. He just slides across the screen like he's been pulled/pushed around the screen by forces unseen.

Conclusion

"Frank Hawk" does have some nice music going for it, but the wonky hit detection and possibility of getting stuck with no way out beyond closing the game is just too much for me to bear. As such, I recommend giving this game a pass.