As an avid skateboarder and gamer, I find this title hard to recommend to just about anyone other than THPS devotees.
This game is terribly flawed. From a control standpoint, from a technical standpoint and from a general "this game is no fun" standpoint. I picked this title up recently at a very cheap price, and chose to do so because I remember how much I used to love it. As soon as I popped it into my PS3 for the first time in years, I was immediately let down.
The first problem I noticed was the incredibly wonky framerate. The game will run at a good 30fps, but not a solid 30fps. Sometimes the framerate can drop down to (from what I've personally witnessed) 10fps, and this was occurring within the first 10 minutes of play. Graphically (as with most early current-gen console games) everything has a clay-like, muddy look to it. The character models' faces look like putty. But I'll give it the benefit of the doubt since the game was released a good 6 years ago. The open world city does look nice, but there are some pretty lo-res textures here and there, and the game seems to have a problem with lighting, since shadows from NPC's come out of absolutely nowhere on the screen at times.
Gameplay wise, you have your basic set of Tony Hawk challenges that range from competitions, demos, classic goals, such as collecting the SKATE letters, secret discs (not tapes this time around) and collecting COMBO letters. The controls work fine and they're as responsive as any Tony Hawk title, but the character models performing these actions are a different story. Physically the game looks and feels awkward. Your character you create from a very limited set of options will ollie (jump) off the ground sometimes with knees fully bent, your skateboard will randomly go through the terrain you're skating on, and overall, it just feels like a mess and not as solid as the PS2 era Tony Hawk games. They had rebuilt this engine from the ground up, and it shows in some bad ways.
The "motion capture" in this game was way over-hyped, and to this day, I still don't believe a lot of people truly understand what Neversoft did with the mo-cap. We were fed lies in promotional videos that every pro skater in the game would have their own skate-style as they do in real life, which simply is not true. No matter which pro skater you choose to play as, every single trick looks the same. The only thing Neversoft did with the motion capture was capture the exact look and shape of the pro skaters in the game's bodies. So you're not getting their skateboarding nuances, styles and their unique way of doing tricks (sans cut-scenes and the "pro tricks" feature which lets you view motion captured tricks, which is highly entertaining if you're actually into skateboarding and is my personal favorite feature of the game), you're only getting the shapes of their bodies. Which is a total bummer, but still makes for some nice looking, albeit muddy-ish, character models.
There are tons of challenges here to keep you busy, but as far as actual fun goes, you'll find yourself more frustrated at times than not due to unfair challenge. Certain goals don't make it very clear as to what you're supposed to do or where you're supposed to go, and it all turns into trial and error. I'd consider myself a vet at Tony Hawk games, being able to rack up scores of 5,000,000+ combos, but the physics and framerate are just so awkward and wonky (framerate especially so on the PS3) that it becomes unfair. With frame drops like this in a game that's all about precise timing, it definitely hinders the whole experience.
Nearly every challenge in the game has 3 rankings to them: Am, Pro and Sick. Which means you can finish a challenge and get by with the skin of your teeth and achieve an Am ranking, or you could go back to the challenge later on at any time and choose to do better at it to achieve a Pro or Sick rank. A lot of challenges ask you to do specific tricks that get progressively harder in these 3 rankings, so this is a good system since you don't have to work your ass off on any specific challenge to progress through the game. If you can't finish a challenge on Pro or Sick level, simply move to another one.
In Project 8, Neversoft attempted to make the Tony Hawk series more realistic than ever before, and this is highly apparent with "Nail the Trick" mode, where you use both analog sticks to control your feet to flip and spin the skateboard around. However, as fun as this feature can be to mess around with, it's not nearly as realistic as they would have hoped it to turn out. It just adds more button combinations and confusion to newcomers of the series. A series that already had enough finger/button gymnastics to accomplish in the first place.
With all of this being said, THP8 isn't necessarily a bad game. In fact, it's the best Tony Hawk title on current-gen consoles. But that's really not saying much with games like Proving Ground, Ride and Shred abound. With the EA Skate trilogy available, I find it incredibly hard to go back to the days of Tony Hawk games and grinding down power lines. There's no sense of satisfaction and it all feels so arcadey in contrast to Skate's sense of accomplishment from learning how to kickflip. As an avid skateboarder and gamer, I find this title hard to recommend to just about anyone other than THPS devotees.