It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly seven years since the release of OlliOlli 2, to me, the premier example of how to do a 2D skateboarding game. After a sufficient break, Roll7 is ready to dust off their boards with OlliOlli World.
OlliOlli World
Developer: Roll7
Price: $30
Platform: PC, PS5, Switch, XSX
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
As I mentioned in my previous previews of the game (here and here) the game features a drastic departure from its predecessors’ art styles into a more 3D pastel wonderland. It’s absolutely gorgeous to look at, as each of the five worlds features a distinct look and cast of characters. One zone will have you grinding past giant bumblebees, while another features sentient cacti. It’s as much fun skating in these worlds as it is seeing all the detail and full of life they seem as you zoom by. The only issue I found with this was OlliOlli World’s new narrative focus. You play as a new skater who’s on a journey to prove themselves as the next great skater. Each level opens and ends with your crew of riffraff friends spouting some dull exposition on why they love skateboarding. At the start it was charming, but you quickly realize they’re just repeating the same thing over and over in different ways across the game’s dozens of levels and it starts to wear thin. The intro level conversation you can thankfully skip, but you can’t with the closing one, and it just starts to become an annoyance as the dialog isn’t interesting and is just slowing you down from jumping into the next level to do what’s actually fun: skating.
If you’re unfamiliar with the previous games in the series, OlliOlli is a 2D skateboarding game. Your character continuously moves forward so your focus is on keeping your speed up and performing the appropriate tricks for any incoming obstacles. It’s got a simple control scheme where a flick of the left stick in any direction will make you jump with a flip trick, while doing the same will also allow you to grind if you’re near a rail. You can perform grabs by flicking the right stick, spins are done with the triggers, and a variety of other tricks are performed with combinations of the left or right analog stick + one of the face buttons. It’s an easy system that allows you to jump in immediately and start having fun, but there’s enough depth for the diehards to master if you want to hit those highscores.
As you play, you’ll move across the map of Radlandia that’s separated into five zones. There are about a dozen levels in each zone, along with a handful of side quests you can discover if you find the right character in a level. Each level features two sets of goals to accomplish that reward cosmetics: a set of score goals to beat and in-level challenges. The score goals are pretty standard, the challenges however can get tricky and sometimes even require you to replay levels. OlliOlli World features branching paths, sometimes multiple in a level, that split areas into harder sections called “Gnarly Routes”. A challenge to find a hidden alien artifact might be hidden on one of these paths, and you’ll never know which until you take one and find out. It’s usually fun to take a path to see where it might take you, as they sometimes even weave in and out of each other as you can drop from one path back to another at times, and it’s also nice knowing that if a level if feeling a bit too easy that you’ll have the opportunity to make it harder.
Another change from the previous games is the inclusion of a surprisingly robust customization menu. There are dozens of clothing options and boards to choose from, all themed after some in-lore fake brands. You’re likely to find a style that fits you, and the boards are all a lot of fun to choose from. I went from a basic board with some cool art, to a popsicle shaped board and finally settled on one shaped like some fishbones. There’s some really dumb stuff that I appreciate. Apart from that, you can also customize some of your skater’s animations like how they enter or exit their board, or even the type of grab maneuvers you do. It’s a lot more than you’d expect in this type of game and it’s cool that it’s all here.
Olliolli World will take you maybe 4-5 hours to finish but it doesn’t end there. Besides the obvious replaying of levels to unlock new gear or boards through challenges, you’ll unlock a whole new set of difficult challenges across the entirety of the map. Most of these new challenges are absolutely no joke, like one that only allows you a single grind across the entire level. Or another that requires you to hit every wallride in the level (there are 30), be on the right path to high-five a specific character AND do all of that in a single combo. These post-game challenges require absolute knowledge of the levels and a total mastery of the game’s trick system, so there’s definitely some meat to chew on for the serious players.
There’s also the Gnarvana area to play through which comes in two varieties: a “league” that runs in seasons and the portal. The Gnarvana league basically throws you into a group of players, and the goal is to get as high a score as possible on the level. You can attempt it as many times as you want, but you only have a day before you’re locked out and the next level is available. You’ll be able to earn cosmetics here as well. The other half of Gnarvana is the portal mode. The portal is your typical level generator that allows you to customize the difficulty, length, and setting of the level you generate. A code is created as well so you can immediately send it over to friends to see how they fare and you can save your favorites. My only nitpick is there currently isn’t a way to search for levels, so you basically have to rely on the internet to share their codes, load up the game, and hope you got a good one.
Now I’m not sure if it’s because the transition to a 3D art style makes it easier to take in the environment to better judge jumps, or if the game’s difficulty was purposely toned down, but OlliOlli World is definitely easier to play through than its predecessors. There wasn’t really a level that I couldn’t beat in a single go; I definitely beefed it on some levels but it was always due to me just getting lazy and playing badly. I never hit a level in the campaign that actually felt properly difficult like some in OlliOlli 2 did, and I was always making sure to go down the harder routes. This isn’t a bad thing per say, as you can generate some pretty tough levels in Gnarvana, but I do wish some of the developer made levels had some of that same difficulty instead of having to rely on a level generator to churn something out. Additionally, it’s a bit of an annoyance how you have to enter a level to view its goals/rewards. From the map screen you can hover over it and see whether or not you’ve completed them, but there’s no way to actually view what they are without loading into the level and mashing through the intro conversation. Building on my issue with the boring conversations slowing you down from getting into the fun part of the game, this is another speed bump that keeps you from immediately jumping into the fun part of the game. If I want to focus on the levels that give new boards as a reward, I want to be able to quickly scan the map and see them, not go through a multistep process for what should be readily available information. At the end of the day it’s a nitpick, but a nitpick that repeatedly comes up nonetheless.
The Final Word
OlliOlli World is a phenomenal follow-up that takes everything Roll7 learned in the previous games, and perfects it.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
