Back in the late 90′s/early 00′s extreme sport games were at the hight of popularity. I like many gamers out there spent hours trying to nail the perfect tricks on games such as Matt Hoffman’s BMX and Tony Hawks Pro Skater.
Since then games such as this have seemed to have dropped off the planet. True we had a pretty decent SSX game in 2012 but it didn’t have some of the magic the original extreme sports games had. Now in 2015 Curve Digital plan to bring this magic back to our home consoles with OlliOlli.
Much like your conventional skate boarding game. OlliOlli’s main focus is for the player to achieve high trick combinations by pulling off as many tricks as possible. What makes OlliOlli different however is the fact that it is a 2D side scrolling game.
Each level has a basic goal of getting to the finish line in once peice, but much like a lot of 2D mobile games such as Jetpack Joyride or Extreme Road Trip there are a bunch of optional goals to achieve to get a better level completion. This makes the game super addictive as you try to nail the perfect trick combo or grind for the right amount of time to unlock these goals.
More often than not you will find your 2D avatar face planting the pavement as pulling off tricks is quite a hard skill to master. Tricks are executed by holding down the the left stick before a jump and then quickly releasing and then moving the left stick in a certain direction to perform a trick, you then have to make sure you press the A button as you land to land safely. It is as complicated as it sounds and you will more than likely find yourself getting pretty frustrated. Grinding is not as bad as you only have to hold down on the left stick as you land on a rail, but you will find yourself getting quite confused trying to execute tricks between rail grinds. It is a shame as this game would of benefited from simple button presses for trick execution lessening the very steep learning curve.
The game visually looks very retro as the visuals rely heavily on pixel graphics. In turn this gives OlliOlli a very retro feel which will appeal to a lot of gamer from the 80′s/90′s generations. More often than not nostalgia hit me like a brick to the face as I was reminded of the visual style of Streets of Rage combined with the gameplay of Tony Hawk. It was almost as if Skate from Streets Of Rage 2 had hung up his Rollerblades and got his own skateboarding game.
Pros:
+ Great Visual Style
+ Good Replay Value
Cons:
- Steep Learning Curve
- Unnecessarily complicated controls
60 / 100XP
All in all OlliOlli is a solid skateboard side scroller with a good dose of replay value which encourages you to achieve higher. The steep learning curve however can leave you quite frustrated, unless you do like eating tarmac on a regular basis.
- Garv