OlliOlli World (PS4) REVIEW – Mostly Gnarly

Not quite out of this world, but definitely worth a kickflip or something (we are not Tony Hawk).

OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World
Release Date
February 8, 2022
Developer
Roll7
Publisher
Private Division
Platform(s)
PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch
Microtransactions
None
Our Score
7.5

There’s something about skateboarding in video games that feels more open to exaggeration than other sport sims. The speed of the board, the mechanical simplicity paired with the complexity that’s needed to master it, and a dollop of youthful counterculture spirit all combine to make skateboarding an appealing virtual endeavor. Skating in real life can be a dangerous hobby, but virtual skating brings all of the thrills with none of the spills.

OlliOlli World expands on the side-scrolling shredding of its two predecessors, OlliOlli and OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood. World keeps the action on a 2D, almost auto-runner like set-up: you drop in a level and your create-a-skater will instantly launch forward. You’ll ollie, grind, wall-ride, spin, and manual your way through five skateboarding worlds and a massive variety of sprawling levels. In concept, it might sound simple to just call it a skateboarding platformer.

OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World

In practice, the simplicity gives way to the true OlliOlli World experience: What if they made a whole game out of the Mine Cart levels from Donkey Kong Country, but with skateboards? Turns out, making a whole game out of the Mine Cart levels from Donkey Kong Country but with skateboards is a pretty good idea.

OlliOlli World’s skateboarding controls are all very intuitive and easy to pick up. Tricks are done with one analog stick, grabs are done with the other. You press one button to kick forward, another to switch lanes when you have the option. Mid-air spins are used by pressing the shoulder buttons. Everything is easy to pick up and grasp, while still full of complexity when it comes time to rack up combos and chase your own high score. Hitting a grind always feels exciting and compelling, even when you’re just holding a stick in one direction and waiting for the right time to dismount.

OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World

Beyond how sound its controls and feedback are, OlliOlli World has a pervasive joyful atmosphere, with every new area and level brimming with charm and style. All of the characters have an exaggerated, cartoony layout calling to mind shows like Adventure Time, with brightly-colored lanky bodies and the occasional cool weirdo with ice cream hair or a sandcastle head. You unlock new clothing and board customization items by getting high scores and completing course-specific challenges, like collecting certain items, or performing a specific kind of trick, like grinding across a whalebone in a course.

Beyond your character, the world itself is full of personality. Whales and squids swim in the background of a beachfront, and a factory full of grind rails is also teeming with steamy, clanging machinery. Even as you blast through these areas at top speed, it’s impossible not to feel like you and your board are part of a larger organism, like a flea stuck to the side of a deer sprinting through the woods. You are so very fast, and the world around you is also so very fast, and nearly everything about the experience is tight, focused and smooth as can be.

OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World

If that last section felt a little too new agey crystals-and-astrology former-tumblr-user for you, then buckle up for OlliOlli World’s writing. The loose story is about your character training to become a Skate Wizard, the emissary on Earth for the land of Radlandia’s five all-powerful Skate Godz (the Z is of course necessary for a real skater). You travel with Chiffon, the current Skate Wizard, and a motley crew of other skaters, including an older gentleman called Dad. He’s not your dad, or anyone else’s — that’s just his name. OlliOlli World’s humor and overall tone feel charmingly preserved in the early 00s, with all of the “how do you do, fellow kids” energy that such a tone entails. Your mileage may vary depending on how much you enjoy jokes about weed that are so diffused to not alert youngsters.

OlliOlli World’s soundtrack is full of modern indie pop and ambient electronic tracks, all great for mellowing out and skating through the lush world. Tracks play seamlessly through menus, cutscenes, and actual levels, and you can skip forward or backward with the press of the shoulder button, a great and intuitive feature that makes you feel like you’re flicking through tunes on your ipod while hanging at the skatepark. However, this does ultimately leave every new area you find feeling kind of same-y, at least as far as how each level sounds. You skate through a beach, a forest, and a desert among other biomes, but they all have the exact same radio station playing. While it doesn’t actively hurt the experience, this does feel like a missed opportunity to make each level and world have its own distinct sound and identity.

OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World

Once you’ve met your crew and been able to dive into OlliOlli World’s levels, you’ll get a feel for how the buttery-smooth skating and the adult swim stoner-toon art lock together to make you feel like you’re riding this psyched-out wave, grinding on rails of the mind more than metal and concrete. You learn about new moves at a reasonable pace, and while you’ll eventually be struggling to keep your hands up with every new technique at once if you want the faintest hope of getting a high score, OlliOlli World does its best to not bury you in new information.

However, just because information progresses at a reasonable rate, it doesn’t mean the game has an easy incline. There are a few difficulty spikes in OlliOlli World that make you feel like you’re going from a backyard halfpipe straight to the X-Games. Jumps become suddenly precarious, making momentum impossible to carry forward, and wiping you out so often that it begins to feel more like a skateboarding version of Celeste. While there are mid-course checkpoints at a decent interval, you commence shooting forward at your starting speed when you restart, which can either trap you in a loop of going too slow or too fast to handle the same obstacle that’s wiped you out so many times before.

OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World

Later courses also become extremely abbreviated, relying on spaghetti-esque overlapping alternate routes that you can only access if you replay them. There’s clearly an arcadey sensibility underwriting much of OlliOlli World’s design principles, but the sudden drop off from the sprawling maps of the first 80% of the game really lets the air out of what should likely be a climactic journey.

Most irksome of all, and decidedly not-rad, OlliOlli World has some performance issues that threaten to throw grit in your wheels. Character models often feel stuttery and suffer frame rate drops, which is curious but innocuous when it’s just happening to still characters during dialogue. What’s harder to ignore is when the game suffers brief (and for me they were only ever brief) freezes mid-course when there’s too much exciting business happening on-screen. It’s usually a guaranteed run-killer, and while respawning at a checkpoint is always fast, it’s still a frustrating bug in a game built on the seamless flow of movement.

OlliOlli World
OlliOlli World

OlliOlli World feels like a game out of time. A 90s idea of what’s cool, as told by a late 00s cartoon, with a pleasing (if forgettable) soundtrack from last decade’s college radio. It gestures at ideas of coolness and the pure pleasure of taking up the holy board without really drilling down into the counterculture ideology underneath it all. Maybe it doesn’t have to – skating isn’t about thinking, after all, it’s about skating.

While there are a lot of frustrating brick walls you’ll skate headlong into during your journey, OlliOlli World mostly makes good on its promise of speed, style, and stunning visuals.

A PS4 key was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.

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OlliOlli World
Verdict
OlliOlli World stumbles here and there, with a steep difficulty curve and occasional technical hitches, but fans of skateboarding games will find plenty of combo-stringing complexity to enjoy.
7.5