[4] Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD is a skateboarding video game, with an arcade-style emphasis with regard to realism.

[5] Included in the content is the ability to perform a revert, a trick which involves changing the direction of the board while keeping forward momentum.

In exchange for completion of these objectives players are rewarded with points that can be spent to upgrade a character's attributes.

These include achieving a set high score, collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E, and finding a hidden DVD (in the same vein of the "Secret Tapes" from the first three games) within each level.

Higher scores have a greater impact on decreasing the player character's head or balloon size.

Two fictional bonus characters return, Officer Dick and Ollie the Magic Bum, who have appeared several times in the series.

Downloadable content has been released featuring three levels from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (Airport, Canada, and Los Angeles) with extra playable characters including pros Geoff Rowley and Steve Caballero along with James Hetfield and Robert Trujillo from Metallica.

It is a return to the gameplay of the original games in the series, predating Tony Hawk: Ride, and as such could only be played using a standard controller.

The game is not a high-definition port of the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but rather an amalgamation of levels collected from the first two installments, remade using Unreal Engine 3 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

IGN's Nic Vargas gave the game a score of 8/10, praising its purist gameplay whilst lamenting the lack of certain modes such as park creator and split screen multiplayer.

[22] The reviewer from GameTrailers gave the game a score of 7.4 and said that Pro Skater HD "isn't flawless, but... it at least gets off on the right foot".

[19] Destructoid gave the game 4.5/10, stating that the execution isn't handled as well as the original titles, as well as some of the design choices the developer made.