OlliOlli World Review – PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, PC

The true grind

OlliOlli Wolrd is fun but very frustrating. That’s a fair warning for anybody with a tendency to throw their gamepads.

If you’re not familiar with Roll7’s OlliOlli series, this is as good a place as any to start. In fact, I would argue that going back to the previous games would just be too jarring. Not in a gameplay sense, mind you, but in the aesthetics.

Game Information
Release Date: February 8th, 2022
Developer: Roll7
Publisher: Private Division
Availability: Microsoft Store, PSN, Steam, Nintendo Store

The first two games were very simple but very clean 2D skaters that had players send their radical dude from one side of the screen to the other, pulling tricks along the way and trying not to smash their face into the ground.

OlliOlli World is more of the same on the gameplay front, albeit with a few tweaks and additions. The big change is in how the game looks. Gone are the simple 2D cityscapes, replaced with a cartoony 2.5D world with different skating lanes that can be chosen, and characters with faces and dialogues. Not that I cared for what any of them had to say. More on that in a minute.

For veterans, the gameplay will be instantly familiar. For newcomers, it’ll take a bit of getting used to, especially if your go-to skating game is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1&2 Remake. That said, even though I’ve played the first two games to death – I had to replace the nub on my PS Vita after a three-week OlliOlli addiction – I still had to grapple with the controls.

Jumping is not on the A or cross buttons on your gamepads, but instead, it’s mapped to the left stick. The left stick is all you really need. In fact, I’m sure you could go through the entire game using only the left stick. You’ll flick it to do a jump. You’ll flick and twist to do an advanced trick. You’ll flick and hold it to grind and wallride. And yet, after a couple of nights gritting my teeth as I failed and bailed a million times, I still instinctively go to press the A button to jump sometimes. You’ll get the hang of it, eventually, and when you do, it’ll click and when that happens, it feels amazing.

Sending your player-created character barreling down a huge ramp, flipping off the edge and chaining together a dozen grinds, wall rides, and grab tricks and then sticking the perfect landing is fantastic, though for me at least, it was somewhat rare to achieve this feat on the first attempt. Thankfully, OlliOlli World 2 has a generous checkpoint system that’s near-instant, so there aren’t any long waits to start a new run.

The game is split between five sections, with each section having a dozen or so levels for you to play through. Each level has two primary goals: Finish the run and don’t use a checkpoint. Then there are the challenge goals, like smack some seagulls, avoid a whale, don’t ollie, and so on. And then finally, you have the high scores. So, if you’re a completionist who wants to do it all so you can justify getting yourself the “Been There, Done That” t-shirt, you’ll have a lot to work through.

Gameplay-wise, I can’t really fault OlliOlli World all that much. I knew what to expect going in, and I got it, plus some more. It’s challenging and at times frustrating – my Xbox Series X controller was fighting for its life throughout this review – but it’s also rewarding. By that I mean I felt a sense of “hell yeah!” whenever I finally overcame a tricky stretch of a level, but you also get rewarded with items that you can use to customise your character. This, I didn’t care for. My character is a plain Chris. A digital facsimile of the man, the myth, the legend. Nothing outlandish. But if you care about that stuff, you can customise to your heart’s content. Are you a balding old guy who wishes he had long pink hair? You can live that fantasy here, buddy. But for me, digital doo-dads just don’t do anything.

Another annoyance I had was the game’s story. There’s a story this time and the characters have a lot to say. I didn’t care for any of it. I watched the intro cutscene to get the gist of what’s going on, and I even let the NPC dialogue run its course for the first few levels, but I soon opted to skip the dialogue and get to the skating. The game even gives you the choice at the start of each new level to either listen (or read, actually) to what is being said to learn about the skating gods blah blah blah, or you can press A or cross to get to the good stuff. So whatever story is being told, it is sadly being wasted. But nobody plays a skating game for the story, right? Unless we’re talking about the G.O.A.T Tony Hawk’s Underground. How it didn’t get an Oscar nomination, I don’t know, but the past is the past. Remake it, Activision, you f^&king cowards!

And that’s your lot, basically. It’s the OlliOlli you know and love – I’m making an assumption there – but with fancier graphics, some tweaks to add depth to the gameplay, and a story if you really want it. It’s fun, frustrating, and if you’re an old-timer like me, you’ll need to play it in bursts so as to keep your blood pressure in check. Yeah, this game pissed me off a lot, but I still liked it and I’ll play some more to get as many of the achievements as I can, but I’ll consider my controller not being embedded in the wall the biggest achievement of them all.

Review Disclaimer: This review was carried out using a copy of the game provided by the publisher. For more information, please read our Review Policy.

Primary version tested: Xbox Series X