After five years, the next Tony Hawk game has arrived: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4. Being a remake of the third and fourth installments in the franchise, this game takes it back to the old-school, with the return of many favorite elements, including a stellar intro. However, it also brought back the series' trademark difficulty. The Tony Hawk titles are among the most challenging sports games ever created, if not the toughest.
Scoring a 100% completion rating for both Project 8 and Proving Ground is a major accomplishment, and Pro Skater 3 + 4 remains on par in terms of difficulty. Pro Skater 1 + 2 was already brutal, taking a huge amount of time getting to level 100, but the sequel is worse. You must complete 30 whole playthroughs of both games, plus do a lot of challenges, only for the elite level players. It's no surprise that four achievements in this game have only been obtained by 0.01% of players on Xbox.
5 Skater Challenger – 0.09%
Pro Skater's Sick Trick Combos
The easiest out of the five hardest achievements in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 must be Skater Challenger, which, appropriately, requires you to complete every Skater challenge. Nearly all the Skater challenges revolve around one particular pro skater, in which you must do a 250,000-point combo that contains their exclusive special trick. This seems brutal on paper, but there's a way to make this achievement significantly easier.
Bam and Andy are the only secret skaters required for this achievement, and you also don't need to find all the hidden decks. In fact, you don't need to collect the hidden decks at all for 100% completion. While you can use assist mods for the Skater challenges, you sadly won't be able to use them for everything, including the hardest achievement in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4.
4 Expert Challenger – 0.01%
The Biggest Hurdle In 100% Completing This Game
After fully completing Career Mode, you'll unlock the Expert challenges, which contain the hardest tasks required for achievements yet in the series. There are even two whole sets of Expert challenges, compared to all the other challenge types, which only have one. The Expert 1 and 2 lists mostly contain three types of challenges: hard speedruns, legendary scores, and high score combo gaps.
Hard speedruns involve completing a park in Speedrun Mode under an extremely minimal time requirement. The time limits here leave no room for error, and one slip-up can result in you having to redo the entire level again. Thankfully, you won't need to complete the pro goals, only the regular ones. Legendary scores require you to often gain over 2 million points in one level within a two-minute time limit or in a single combo. There's no easy way out or shortcuts, and you must get good at Tony Hawk to stand a chance.
High score combo gaps typically involve gaining a million-point or more combo that contains a specific gap. Once again, you'll need to master the mechanics of Tony Hawk to string together such a huge combo required here. The worst part is that you cannot use assist mods at all to complete Expert challenges, making them truly for expert-level players. There is one challenge that isn't too bad, and that's gaining 10 million points in any park.
3 Flying Solo – 0.01%
The Worst Part Of The Entire Achievement List
While Expert Challenger has to be the hardest pure skill-based achievement in the game, there's no doubt that Flying Solo is the most annoying, tedious, and longest achievement. After finishing Career Mode, you unlock Solo Tours, which are essentially the exact same as the regular Career Mode, but you only play as a specific pro skater. There was some initial confusion about this achievement, but it's all been cleared up now.
To get the Flying Solo achievement, you must complete the Solo Tours for all 29 main skaters. This involves completing all regular and pro goals, plus gaining all the platinum medals. None of the unlockable secret skaters are required here, whether Bam Margera, Birdman, or Michelangelo, so that does make things slightly better. At first, people thought you had to complete the Solo Tours with every character in the game, but even with only the main pro skaters, that's still 29 entire playthroughs.
That's an obscene grind, even with assist mods turned on, and it's not very fun either. To be frank, reaching level 100 in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 was a better experience because it at least felt like a routine, grinding the same spot over and over again. Here, you essentially need to complete the game 29 extra times, which just crosses the line into being pure ludicrous.
2 THPS4 Challenger – 0.01%
Bigger, But Not Necessarily Harder
Both Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 have their own exclusive set of challenges that are a massive pain. Once again, there are three main types of challenges: gap combos, speedruns, and all gaps. Like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, you must string together numerous gaps in a single combo for each level. Thankfully, there are no hard combo gaps in 3 + 4, so you can use assist mods to complete these.
The longest part, however, has to be completing all the gaps. Each level has dozens of gaps to land, and even with assist mods turned on, finishing them all can take numerous hours when following a guide. Gaps are much more of a problem in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3.
1 THPS3 Challenger – 0.01%
Way Too Many Gaps
The number of gaps in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 is fairly reasonable, while the number in Pro Skater 3 is just ridiculous. For those who've 100% completed Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, you know that Pro Skater 2 had a wild number of gaps compared to its predecessor, making the gap collection grind quite a boring affair. That feeling is much worse in Pro Skater 3.
