High Level Customisation
Right off the bat, you're treated to a rainbow of visuals in its character creation screen. Much like Animal Crossing, you can tinker with how your character looks at any point in the game, but that didn't stop me from spending an ungodly amount of time navigating these screens. Since the art style shares some similarities with Adventure Time - namely, the thin mouths and eyes - I tried my best to create Marceline the vampire. I failed. It was still a ton of fun!
Once you're done picking a character, you enter Radlandia - a rad land full of skateboard enthusiasts. Your character bumps into a small group of friends who decide to teach you the basics of the skateboarding world.
I have to say, my thumb hovered over the ‘skip cutscene' button most of the time because the story never tries to do anything more than give you reasons to skateboard in different places and in different ways. This didn't impact my enjoyment of the game too much, thankfully, because OlliOlli World doesn't really want to be taken seriously.
I have to say, my thumb hovered over the ‘skip cutscene’ button most of the time because the story never tries to do anything more than give you reasons to skateboard in different places and in different ways.
Throughout the campaign, you'll visit multiple biomes in your quest to become the best skateboarder Radlandia has ever seen. The game doesn't put its best foot forward immediately unfortunately, as its first biome is essentially just an overlong series of tutorials.
OlliOlli World is a cute game with a high skill ceiling. There are a ton of tricks and techniques to master, so I understand why
this information was doled out to players slowly, but I still wish the game had opted for less tutorial levels with more content.
Once you get through those tutorial levels however, this game really gets its hooks into you. Executing tricks is deceptively simple - you just
A LOVELY SKATEBOARDING GAME THAT DOESN’T OVERSTAY ITS WELCOME
mash the X button to speed up and hold down the analog sticks in different directions to pull off different tricks. Later on, things get more complicated. You learn how to grind on rails, and chain grinding combos together using nothing but your thumbs and pitch-perfect timing. You learn how to jump off a cliff and skate off a billboard, throwing physics out the window entirely. As you progress, these techniques are chained together in interesting ways, making for frantically-paced gameplay where you're mashing buttons and holding down triggers to rack up points.
It's a lot of fun, in other words. OlliOlli World's levels are visual eye candy and fantastically designed, populated with little areas of respite from the chaos of chaining together techniques and flipping off rails and billboards. These tracks often diverge as well, giving you multiple paths to pursue in a level where more difficult tricks lie on the way to the finish line. Pulling off harder tricks in a shorter amount of time spells more points in the long run, and it also gives you a reason to revisit older levels or try something different if you failed this one.
If you get bored of the main campaign, the game also offers free run levels with random obstacles, where you can skate for as long as your skills hold up. It's skateboarding heaven, and given how much fun it is to grind,
flip and wallride in this game, you can bet your penny board that I took full advantage of it. Completing each level also gives you items to customise your character - whether it be T-shirts or tattoos adding onto the already immense volume of options available in the character customisation screen. I love that stuff, but if you don't care about what your character looks like, these rewards might not enthuse you enough to keep playing.
OlliOlli World is comfort food for skateboarding enthusiasts. You won't find the attention to detail present in classic Tony Hawk games, but that takes nothing away from the game's addictive gameplay loop of chaining together flashy trick combos against beautiful hand-drawn backdrops. While it's slow going at the beginning with overlong tutorials and uninteresting characters, the game's impressive level design and fantastic character customisation system is more than enough for players to sink their teeth into.
One might even say it's radical.