“Skating mini-ramps for real distracted me from this mission”
OLLIOLLI WORLD’s Void Riders DLC brings tractor-beams and extraterrestrial tricks to Radlandia
GRABBY BEAMS MAY OFFER A REASSURING EMBRACE, BUT THEY’RE TRICKY
Ibought a skateboard recently. And two games are to blame for this. The first is The Ramp, a mellow, digital skating toy that reliably occupies me for five minutes whenever I remember it exists.
But the other is OlliOlli World, Roll7’s ostensibly chill, colorful and cartoonish skate platformer. Though at its meanest, it’s also an obsessive trial of reaction-based challenges that awards short-lived victories to odysseys of failure, which I’ve delighted in trying to crack.
Skating mini-ramps for real with my meat legs distracted me from this mission. One especially graceless fall later, however, and I’m back. My avatar, wearing clothes cooler than any I’ll ever own, doesn’t just shame my skills but reduces my ego to ashes. Still, I couldn’t have timed it better.
New to OlliOlli World is VOID Riders, its first DLC, which populates shiny new biomes with aliens and new obstacles, among them ‘grabby beams’. Doing a grab trick into one of these zero-G columns sends you sky-high, a novelty in a game given to grinding and sliding.
Grabby beams may offer a reassuring embrace, but they’re tricky. They’ll catch you as you tumble from a marathon of barelycontrolled tricks, then abruptly throw you like a Frisbee onto the next obstacle. More fundamentally, the beams bring your right thumb into play, wreaking havoc on your input mastery, such as it is. Grabby beams are floaty and fun, but bump the ceiling, exit too slow or too low, and you’re wiping out.
HAIL NEBULORD
Grabby beams also help the new levels feel more chaotic. On Old Bridgey’s Old Bridge, beams divide short ledges and bits of grinding rail for a fast-paced ride. On the other hand, one level is just a single block of grabby beam with vertical ramps either side. Your job is to collect all the cow piñatas floating within without colliding with obstacles. In 90 seconds. I’m glad I never see this variation of the grabby beam again.
Throughout VOID Riders we’re aiming to impress none other than the Nebulord, a not-so-bad bad guy in keeping with OlliOlli World’s cheerful universe. What else but these infernal devices to cap off the final level: the checkpoint-devoid Nebulord’s palace. Here the grabby beams are the developer’s chosen method to frustrate the player. But I beat it. It helps that throughout OlliOlli World, tension is stratified by goofiness. For my woes, I unlock the Nebulord’s gelatinous head.