Essentially taking a bulky motion-sensitive snowboard and forcing you to stand tensed on top of it on your living room carpet, shifting your balance back and forth every so often, and generally looking a little constipated was arguably never going to be a stellar recipe for a game. You can see what Activision and Robomondo were trying to do with this one, but unfortunately it was just a little…erm…rubbish.

Nevertheless, there are bound to be some people out there still interested in giving Tony Hawk Ride a go, and we don’t really differentiate between sane and idiotic consumer choice when it comes to subjectively appraised things like game quality, we’re more about saving you money. Amazon and GAME are both offering the PS3 game and skateboard attachment for £49.98, which is a good £10 cheaper than anywhere else with stock. It’s worth noting that with the GAME version you get an exclusive board design and reward points.

• Click here to buy Tony Hawk: Ride for £49.98 from Amazon
• Click here to buy Tony Hawk: Ride for £49.98 from GAME

First off, it’s cheaper to buy a skateboard than buy this. Secondly, it’s probably actually easier to learn to skate properly than play this game. It’s a good thing that the board is as durable as it is because you’ll spend half of your time trying to break it out of sheer frustration.

There are three game modes – Casual, Confident and Hardcore – but the unresponsive board means that trying anything above Casual means you’re pretty much doomed to failure. The game steers automatically in the lowest difficulty mode, attempting it for yourself is a lesson in humility until you learn that nothing you can really do would make the board respond to your liking. You could treat the board to a candlelit dinner on the Riviera, the finest wines available to humanity, and compliments to make Casanova feel inadequate and the bloody thing still wouldn’t respond favourably.

The loading times are bad, the graphics pretty poor and the gameplay has been simplified to try and make everything more accessible. The last point wouldn’t be so bad if the game approached anything even remotely resembling fun, but it doesn’t. There’s potential there, but after trying to get the game to read your kickflip for the sixteenth time of trying patience and goodwill begins to wear a little thin.

This is a good price for a peripheral-reliant game such as this, but please bear in mind that there’s a reason for it. The £10 you’ll save will probably end up being spent on paracetamol to deal with the migraine you end up with from attempting to deal with this broken, unfinished piece of tat. Still, each to their own I suppose.

Thanks to dontdothatagain at HUKD