There is, it's said, a season for all things. Everything has its time and fades away unless it's able to totally reinvent itself. Big game franchises are no different, and there was a period when the Tony Hawk series dominated the skateboarding game genre. It reigned more or less unchallenged until 2007, when Skate rolled up offering an alternative, and the Tony Hawk franchise fell into a rut.

But as any good skater knows, when you're getting trounced by the competition you just have to pull off more impressive tricks to wow the punters, and we're willing to bet that's exactly what Activision thought would happen with their latest offering in Tony Hawk: Ride. But despite having taken time out to create a whole different kind of skateboard game and new skateboard peripheral inspired by the success of the Guitar Hero franchise, this sadly broken attempt to reinvent the franchise doesn’t impress, feeling like equivalent of landing a face plant after trying a new and fancy-looking trick.

You see, Activision and developer Robomodo have decided the game pad is a thing of the past, and have done away with it in favour of skateboard simulation and Tony Hawk: Ride's realistic sensor-filled skateboard peripheral. You don't even have the option to use a controller. We don't really have a problem with that, but if you're going to replace the traditional controller you need to do it with something that works. And Ride comes crashing to the kerb at this first hurdle.

On paper, playing Ride should be an intuitive affair as the board’s sensors read your actions and translate them on screen. Sweeping your leg along the ground next to the board makes your character push off to gain speed. Raising the board’s nose halfway slowly lifts your on-screen board into a manual. Raising it sharply makes you ollie (jump) and then twisting it or tilting it lets you do more complex manoeuvres like tilt and flick tricks. It will all be familiar to skating fans and seems easy enough. Shame then that you'll struggle to consistently pull it all off in game thanks to a frustrating disconnect between your motions and on-screen actions.

There are three levels of difficulty in Ride, and on the lowest (Casual), the game mostly steers for you, and you only need to do tricks on demand. It's initially fun as the board is a novelty, but you soon realise it's virtually playing itself. Worse yet, doing tricks feels totally arbitrary, as performing the required motions doesn't always result in them happening on screen. You aren't getting the satisfaction of learning or mastering anything even on this simple level. At first we put it down to lack of experience, but after a few hours playing on higher difficulties, which require you to navigate the board, we realised Ride’s peripheral-based controls are just faulty.

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