With the lack of good skateboarding games being released now days, OlliOlli wants to try and bring back that feeling of speed and excitement that many gamers experienced in the ’90s and early aughts. The end result is a decent skateboarding game that suffers from a lack of content and sometimes unresponsive controls.
OlliOlli is pretty straight forward for a PC game, which makes sense because it is a PlayStation Vita port. I am not knocking on the PlayStation Vita, but you can tell from the beginning that OlliOlli originated on a handheld platform. It isn’t the pixelated graphics, but the basic menus, and the low amount of content with high a replay value.
There are five worlds for you to skate in: Urban, Junkyard, Port, Base, and Neon City. The only difference between these words are the looks. Each world presents the same obstacles and objects for you to jump over, grind on, and do tricks off of, with a different look of course.
After an hour or so of playtime, I’ve unlocked all but on world, with each level taking around one minute or so to complete. You can start to rack up minutes on each level by their difficulty.
Each level presents five challenges for you to complete, and the challenges are unique to the levels. Normally the first two challenges have you try to gain a certain amount of points in your run, and score a high combo score, with the other three challenges focusing more on tricks and level specific challenges. Some will have you picking up all the collectibles in a level, others will have you jumping a specific gap.
You can unlock the next career level by just getting to the end of a stage, but you’ll need to beat challenges to unlock spots and pro levels. Spots challenge you to see how long you can keep a single combo going on one run, and pro are career levels with even more insane challenges.
You control your skater with the left stick. All tricks are performed with the left stick, and it can get kind of frustrating having all tricks on one stick. You can hold down the left bumper or right bumper to modify a trick, but it doesn’t change the fact that every trick requires a certain movement of the left stick to perform.
Like previous skateboarding games that relied on the sticks to perform tricks, the system can be spotty. There are times you pull off a trick you didn’t mean to, and other times that you look down at your thumb and watch your movement so you can perform the correct trick, and the game doesn’t recognize the trick.
On top of that, you have to press the “A” button before you land, and if you time it wrong, it can mess up your entire run. Like the tricks, there are times where you press “A” before landing, and you’ll get a perfect landing. Sometimes you think you time exactly like you did before, but the game gives you an “okay” or “sloppy” rating on your landing, which can significantly reduce your overall score. It would be nice if the developers would add a little notification to why you did not score a “perfect” landing, saying if you were early or late to pressing the button.
The presentation of the game is okay. It takes a while to notice things in the environment that will knock your skater off their board, but you learn quickly. Other than that complaint, the graphics are fine. OlliOlli features a pixelated art style that many indie games are going for recently. The game’s soundtrack is awesome though. Make sure you have some great speakers that can put out some bass.
Once you get through all the content in the game, there isn’t much that brings you back to OlliOlli. The only kind of multiplayer in the game is a daily grind challenge, which is a spot level where your score is uploaded to a leaderboard. It isn’t known if the developer will add new content to the game in the future, but right now after playing for close to an hour and a half, I could see myself maybe putting another hour or two into the game.
OlliOlli does a decent job of bringing back that feeling of skateboarding games from the past, but at times it suffers from the same problems of the past: random unresponsive control. For those looking for a skateboarding fix, or wanting a game to play for half an hour at a time, I would recommend OlliOlli. But if you’re looking for a skateboarding game that could rival something like Skate 2, then look elsewhere.
Score: 7.5/10
OlliOlli was developed by Roll7 and General Arcade and published by Devolver Digital for PC on July 22nd. A retail copy of the PC version was provided to us by Devolver Digital for reviewing purposes.
