Parent's Guide: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is a skating game, in which players leap on their boards and skate around various locales, performing tricks and completing random missions and challenges as they go. Generally pretty easy to control, it's up to you to navigate underground bunkers, warehouses and school yards, jumping, grinding and stringing together airborne flips and other tricks to earn points. The more you manage to string together into one combo, the more points you'll get, but the higher your chance of messing up and crashing face-first into the floor.

Beyond the skating, each area has its own set of unique missions to complete, from high score challenges, to collecting specific items, to a skate-trick-based version of Simon Says. Each mission has three increasingly difficult scores to beat, with each level you conquer rewarding you with a star. However, in order to unlock the next area, you'll need to do slightly better on a couple of missions than the most basic one-star 'pass' - out of the dozen or so missions in each area, you'll need to get a total of fifteen stars across them all to move on.

In terms of potential stumbling blocks for children, Tony Hawks can be a little bit tricky for kids to pick up and play, due to the reaction speed involved (you'll need to be very quick to pull off some tricks), and the fine motor controls required to steer your skater around the levels without coming a cropper. The other big issue, as is often the case with many games, is one of reading - while most missions are fairly self-explanatory, knowing what to do for some of the quirkier ones could be an issue for the non-reader. It's worth noting too that the way Pro Skater 5's menus are arranged is a little bit strange, and has it's routes in the game's more online multiplayer-centric design. When choosing a level to play, it defaults to trying to set up an online game (with up to 20 people), but a simple press of the triangle button (on the Playstation 3/4 - other platforms vary) lets you play on your own.

The game itself is actually pretty non-eventful in terms of mature content - there's no blood and guts, sex scenes or bad language whatsoever. The only thing even remotely violent is when your skater falls off their skateboard with an 'oof', before climbing straight back on again. The only mature content beyond that is the odd drug reference/slightly suggestive lyrics, which talk of getting high on weed and whores standing on corners.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Playstation 4