Reviewed on PlayStation Vita
→ January 21, 2014Personal expression through technical, athletic prowess is one of the defining pillars of skateboarding, and OlliOlli distills it down extremely well. There’s a sterile simplicity to its environments that initially lead me to believe its mechanics would follow suit, and initially they did. But after just a little learning and experimentation, OlliOlli opened up to reveal a fun and demanding, if slightly bare-bones representation of street skating.
Right at the title screen OlliOlli’s soulful, eclectic soundtrack washed over me like a soft breeze on a hot city day. It immediately establishes an atmosphere that its workmanlike representations of junkyards and cityscapes would struggle to evoke on their own. Mellow mixtures of sax, piano and percussion made me feel like the places I was skating through had a story, even when the visuals didn’t have much to say. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a painterly, understated quality to the multi-layered parallax backdrops, but on their own, they’re just a tad too mild-mannered to be interesting. With a soundtrack this excellent playing over them though, the net effect is authentic, and unmistakably representative of skater culture.
Actually playing it isn’t as immediately infectious as its tunes are, but at the very least, the elegance of the control scheme assured me that OlliOlli was slowly pushing towards a rewarding sense of mastery rather than a dead end of frustration. The ever-scrolling 2D setup frees the left stick up to do the heavy lifting, which involves holding a direction to load for a jump, and then rotating and releasing it for different tricks. Once in the air, the shoulder buttons are used to add spins, and every trick has to be effectively landed with a timely press of the X button as you hit the ground. This abandons the well-tread Tony Hawk style of trick execution; there’ll be no pressing a direction and a button to pull hardflips or mute grabs here. Initially, this feels alien - like trying to write with your off-hand. But once you’ve squared yourself with it, the real game begins.
Fluidly setting and rolling the left analog while timing perfect grinds and landings started happening naturally as I found myself accidentally stumbling into OlliOlli’s distinct rhythm, but once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it. Watching my little skater dude grind long rails and soar over massive stair sets as his board spun smoothly beneath him made my successes apparent; just as watching him violently tumble end over end down those same steps painfully punctuated my failures. Every slip up is the end of your run, whether it’s on the very first gap, or that last leap as you hear the crowd cheering at the not-so-distant finish line. The temptation to go bigger and bigger is ever-present, constantly rubbing against the impulse to play it safe to protect your score, and the resulting friction can make any given trick attempt an exhilarating gut-check.
Snow grind.
As well-executed as the core mechanic works however, it’s at least partially due to how sparse the actual trick selection is. Though there’s plenty of different flips and grinds, there are no vert-skating elements, and even reasonably large parts of the street skating lexicon are missing. There’s no flatland trickery of any kind, not even manuals, and even street skaters do an occasional grab of some kind. But despite some of the big air you can get over some of the larger gaps, no such options exist. Especially given that you’ll be pulling 20 or more tricks in some of the denser stages, the unbroken cycle of flip, grind, repeat can start to drone a bit, particularly as your repeat stages over and over to complete seemingly arbitrary objectives. Every stage within the same area starts to blend into the next too, so after a while it became easy to fall into a rut where I felt like I was stuck doing the same thing over and over.
Given that, OlliOlli lends itself best to short bursts of play, and the Spots and Daily Grind modes service that need well. Spots lets you try your hand at getting the maximum single trick score you can manage in a confined area, and Daily Grind is a longer form version of the same concept. You practice an entire run on the pre-determined level for that day, and then you get one chance to nail it for your official score. Pull off what you rehearsed perfectly and maybe you’ll find yourself on the leaderboard for the day – or maybe you’ll choke harder than Tony Romo in a playoff game and get nothing but a faceplant and a goose-egg. This leverages the high stakes feeling that the trick and scoring system already foster, and helps limit the monotony that can set in over the career mode’s long haul.
RIP Super Bowl.
More...
→ January 21, 2014Personal expression through technical, athletic prowess is one of the defining pillars of skateboarding, and OlliOlli distills it down extremely well. There’s a sterile simplicity to its environments that initially lead me to believe its mechanics would follow suit, and initially they did. But after just a little learning and experimentation, OlliOlli opened up to reveal a fun and demanding, if slightly bare-bones representation of street skating.
Right at the title screen OlliOlli’s soulful, eclectic soundtrack washed over me like a soft breeze on a hot city day. It immediately establishes an atmosphere that its workmanlike representations of junkyards and cityscapes would struggle to evoke on their own. Mellow mixtures of sax, piano and percussion made me feel like the places I was skating through had a story, even when the visuals didn’t have much to say. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a painterly, understated quality to the multi-layered parallax backdrops, but on their own, they’re just a tad too mild-mannered to be interesting. With a soundtrack this excellent playing over them though, the net effect is authentic, and unmistakably representative of skater culture.
Actually playing it isn’t as immediately infectious as its tunes are, but at the very least, the elegance of the control scheme assured me that OlliOlli was slowly pushing towards a rewarding sense of mastery rather than a dead end of frustration. The ever-scrolling 2D setup frees the left stick up to do the heavy lifting, which involves holding a direction to load for a jump, and then rotating and releasing it for different tricks. Once in the air, the shoulder buttons are used to add spins, and every trick has to be effectively landed with a timely press of the X button as you hit the ground. This abandons the well-tread Tony Hawk style of trick execution; there’ll be no pressing a direction and a button to pull hardflips or mute grabs here. Initially, this feels alien - like trying to write with your off-hand. But once you’ve squared yourself with it, the real game begins.
Fluidly setting and rolling the left analog while timing perfect grinds and landings started happening naturally as I found myself accidentally stumbling into OlliOlli’s distinct rhythm, but once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it. Watching my little skater dude grind long rails and soar over massive stair sets as his board spun smoothly beneath him made my successes apparent; just as watching him violently tumble end over end down those same steps painfully punctuated my failures. Every slip up is the end of your run, whether it’s on the very first gap, or that last leap as you hear the crowd cheering at the not-so-distant finish line. The temptation to go bigger and bigger is ever-present, constantly rubbing against the impulse to play it safe to protect your score, and the resulting friction can make any given trick attempt an exhilarating gut-check.
Snow grind.As well-executed as the core mechanic works however, it’s at least partially due to how sparse the actual trick selection is. Though there’s plenty of different flips and grinds, there are no vert-skating elements, and even reasonably large parts of the street skating lexicon are missing. There’s no flatland trickery of any kind, not even manuals, and even street skaters do an occasional grab of some kind. But despite some of the big air you can get over some of the larger gaps, no such options exist. Especially given that you’ll be pulling 20 or more tricks in some of the denser stages, the unbroken cycle of flip, grind, repeat can start to drone a bit, particularly as your repeat stages over and over to complete seemingly arbitrary objectives. Every stage within the same area starts to blend into the next too, so after a while it became easy to fall into a rut where I felt like I was stuck doing the same thing over and over.
Given that, OlliOlli lends itself best to short bursts of play, and the Spots and Daily Grind modes service that need well. Spots lets you try your hand at getting the maximum single trick score you can manage in a confined area, and Daily Grind is a longer form version of the same concept. You practice an entire run on the pre-determined level for that day, and then you get one chance to nail it for your official score. Pull off what you rehearsed perfectly and maybe you’ll find yourself on the leaderboard for the day – or maybe you’ll choke harder than Tony Romo in a playoff game and get nothing but a faceplant and a goose-egg. This leverages the high stakes feeling that the trick and scoring system already foster, and helps limit the monotony that can set in over the career mode’s long haul.
RIP Super Bowl.
More...
