What the...? They've only gone and turned Hawk's into an RPG. By pensioning off those rusty old pros in favour of some fresh young talent (namely a skater of your own creation), developer Neversoft has cooked up a career mode that has as much in common with Dark Chronicle as it does with previous Tony titles. Okay, there's no scrapping your way through endless dungeons but there's a slick story, a genuine sense of character progression and a heap of asides to the main task of tearing up the streets. It's not quite reinventing the truckbolt but it's damn close. As you'd expect from a series that has consistently oozed class, Tony Hawk's Underground is top-tier gaming.

Starting out in a New Jersey neighbourhood, you're a poor kid with a battered deck and half-pipe dreams of making it big. After hooking up with and impressing the legendary Stacy Peralta, you hit the road on a tour that takes in a bunch of major North American cities including New York, Tampa, San Diego, Vancouver and, oh, Moscow. Along the way you'll be attempting to live the pro-skater lifestyle, getting snapped for magazine ads, shooting footage for a demo video, entering comps, negotiating a shoe sponsor and, of course, designing your own pro-model board. It's a tough ride to the top, but a mighty enjoyable one.

Of the many subtle differences from earlier Tony Hawk's games, the most immediately noticeable is the way the levels are set out. Gone are the likes of cruise ships and foundries - you're now on the streets, busting up sprawling urban environments where office blocks and housing are as much a part of the landscape as plush skate parks and home-made vert ramps. You can skate just about everything in a level and not only are they stuffed to bursting point with opportunities for trickery, they're far bigger than anything we've seen before, both outwards and upwards. Reach for the sky and, likely as not, you'll find a pair of drained swimming pools on top of a high-rise.

Another major refinement is the way in which you build up your skater. Instead of hunting down those out-of-the-way stat points, you now have to fulfil certain requirements to get an upgrade. If you want to boost your rail-balance ability, for example, you'll have to busy a grind for a set amount of time or string together four specific tricks in one combo. Naturally the tasks get trickier as time goes on. The fact that you have to demonstrate your skills to bcome a better boarder really adds to Tony's newly-found realism.

Then there's the whole 'getting off your board and wandering around' thing. Yep, tap the two top shoulder buttons and you'll stick your deck under your arm and become a pedestrian. The main purpose of this is twofold. Firstly, by climbing up ladders and jumping from ledge to ledge it allows you to explore previously unreachable areas. Secondly, you can use the new caveman trick in your combos. For those not in the know, the caveman is where you jump up from a standing start straight into a trick. Get off your board mid-combo and you'll have a brief moment to run to another obstacle and caveman into another trick to continue the run. Sweeter than Sunny D.

Back to the career mode for a sec. While this whole crazy plot thing has certainly changed the game, many of the level goals are identical to previous outings - they're just sporting different threads. For example, you won't have to collect C-O-M-B-O any more but plenty of the people you chat to on the street will ask you to do pretty much the same thing. "Bet you can't knock over all those beer bottles in one run," for example. Clocking high scores, running errands and pulling tricks as they're called out are all present. There's a big emphasis on teaching you how to skate in career mode, which will be something of an irritation to those who've been with the series for a while. We know, dammit, we know.

But for those who want to prove their skating prowess to a global audience, there's the online mode. Oh baby! Take your created skater onto the network and shred the streets with hundreds of other like-minded souls. Just imagine entering online competitions with £££s of prizes up for grabs to the winners - if you've yet to join the broadband revolution, this is as good a reason as any to convert. For those not enamoured with the ways of the web, you can always keep grinding away for a higher score in the free-skate mode, or just whip your mates in the plentiful two-player games.

So is all this enough to entice you back for another session? Hell yeah. Tony Hawk's Underground is slicker than ever, bigger than ever and the whole story mode makes for a genuinely absorbing and frequently amusing adventure. We've yet to find any underground levels, mind. Maybe that's not what they meant...

Graphics 90%
Other than sporadic clipping, Tony Hawk's Underground is delectable.

Sound 80%
There's an epic punk, metal and hip-hop playlist.

Gameplay 99%
Familiar but fantastic. The best Hawk's so far.

Lifespan 90%
Endless appeal due to online and high-score modes.

Overall 90%
Tony Hawk's Underground takes skating games one step further up the evolutionary ladder. Utterly brilliant and addictive.