It's a bit like learning how to walk again after a tragic skateboarding accident. Every year we have to remind ourselves which button is for grind, relearn exactly how many spins we can get in before smashing into the side of a building, and generally work on the old reflexes so that they can cope with more Tony Hawk. It is, after all, one of the videogame world's finest and fastest inventions. And once you've got yourself up to speed, this year's offering - which is Tony Hawk number seven if you've been keeping count since 1999 - is right up there with the best that the skateboarding series has managed to produce. You can count the number of new moves on the fingers of a hand that's been caught up in nasty industrial accident, but this year's Hawk sees a streamlining and change in emphasis since last year's Tony Hawk's Undeground sequel. American Wasteland has got rid of all the MTV Jackass stylings, replacing them with a simple Story mode, featuring five generic skater dudes and a fit goth chick called Mindy.

In the game's Story mode you travel to Los Angeles, hook up with skanky aspiring cartoon illustrator Mindy, and set about trashing the city and stealing bits of scenery so you can build the 'ultimate' new skate park in the Hollywood Hills.

The biggest change to this latest Tony Hawk is the way it's joined together. The first area has a busted subway in it, which you eventually open once you've pulled off a few tricks and impressed the right people. This then leads you to the next 'level', which is accessed by skating down the subway. This unlocking system gradually gives you access to all of Tony Hawk's Los Angeles at once, letting you skate from the last level to the first in one long, seamless journey.

This is a great change. There are buses and cars dumped throughout the game that serve as teleport jumps if you want to get from the skate park to Beverly Hills in a few seconds, so there's no need to worry about there being lots of travelling between the different levels. You're in a nice, complete little world, and you're ever so gently forced to learn it really, really well. Which means you get more out of it in the end, rather than scraping the bare minimum to unlock the next one and moving on, as you did in the Hawks of old. Each area's a little different as you'd expect, but there are no jarring leaps from, say, Alcatraz to a cruise ship and then back to a city carnival, like we've seen in the past. It's loads better this way.

Entirely separate from all this are two very different and welcome sections - Classic mode and Xbox Live play. The Classic bit is the good old progressive, level-based Tony Hawk's, featuring familiar levels from previous games polished up and jigged around. Here you skate around Minneapolis and Chicago from the first Tony Hawk's game, doing the usual tasks - collecting SKATE, earning Stat points to make you better and finding hidden video tapes. All very nice, but it's a shame there are no new levels to enjoy.

Custom mode does have one quite superb ace up its torn and dirty old sleeve, though - split-screen play. Now two players can simultaneously battle to achieve the goals, which, when combined with Xbox Live play, makes this by far the most sociable Tony Hawk game yet. And as you'd expect from a series in its seventh year, the behind-the-scenes customisation options are immense. You can edit tricks, morph skaters and create your own custom skate parks, with vast potential for building your own amazing skate zones and a huge variety of ways to make American Wasteland your own personalised skate heaven.

But a lot of the old cheats and minor flaws exploited by experienced players have not been ironed out. In Classic mode, simple Natas spins and easy button-mashing, lip-trick and rail combos let you beat any high score challenge on your first attempt, while the Story section tends to start off with simple tasks before suddenly giving you impossibly complex missions that'll have you frustrated for hours on end.

But then all the last six Tony Hawk games suffered from this, and they did all right for themselves. What you're getting here is a classy set of new levels, Xbox Live play for eight people and a few old classic levels remade for old time's sake just because they can. It's a bit like a director's cut of Tony Hawk's that gets rid of all the rubbish and tightens up the winning formula. It may simply be going through the motions, but they're bloody good motions.

1. Fantastic polished look, with gleaming levels packed with detail and as smooth as a sandpapered baby.
2. The new 'joined-up' structure that lets you skate between all the game's levels in one go is a superb enhancement.
3. A decent new BMX section has been added, requiring new skills and making the challenge level a little tougher.

1. Apart from the BMX, there's very little in the way of new board tricks in here to discover.
2. If you're a bit handy with a skateboard from playing Hawk over the years; you can complete this pretty quickly!

Bright and breezy, fully online and stripped of the Jackass tomfoolery, this is the best Tony Hawk game in years.