OlliOlli Review

I’m a big fan of the PlayStation Vita, and I’m always one to try out a new game on it as most games have grabbed my attention pretty quickly and have lead me on to an enjoyable experience. However, will OlliOlli succeed in that respect?

You play as an unnamed skater who must travel through several areas, including an urban city area, a port and a neon city. There’s no customisation to the character or the board and whilst it would only have been a small addition, it would have given the protagonist a bit of character, rather than being a nameless, faceless guy who seems to faceplant into rails a lot.

You can get points in several ways; one is by pulling off tricks, which is done with the left analog stick, these throw you in the air and act as a jump as well. Basic tricks involve just pushing it in a single direction, while if you want to score bigger points, you’re going to have to go Street Fighter all over the PS Vita and spin the analog stick around in all sorts of crazy directions whilst mashing the bumpers. Then, on the way down, you have to press X to land properly otherwise you get a major penalty on the points you've earned and your speed is reduced greatly, but thankfully you can push yourself forward as long as you’re on the ground.

The second way to earn points is by grinding. You can grind on practically anything in the levels. You pull off grinds the same way you do tricks, except you have to do them as you start falling near them. The closer you are to the grindable object when you move the analog stick, the more points you get. Much like tricks, you can do basic grinds or you can do some more advanced ones, which are harder to do but obviously earn you more points. Get a perfect grind, and you will get a speed boost (much like landing), which is necessary on levels where a lot of grinding is needed, as you won’t be able to push yourself forward like you normally can. You can combo your tricks and grinds in order to get a huge bonus to the points you're rewarded, so long as you land safely.

Your goal is to get to the end of the level. Seems simple enough. However there are challenges to do on each level. They might be to get a certain amount of points, or to collect all spray cans and reach the finish. Completing all challenges on a level will unlock a Pro level, which includes harder challenges for you to complete. There is also a ‘Daily Grind’, which, guess what, changes daily. A new level is introduced each day that requires grinding all the way through to win. During this time, you must pull off the best tricks and grinds you can in order to get the highest score on the leaderboard. But if you fail, there’s no retrying. Thankfully, there’s a practice button so you can get to grips with the level before going into it.

Now, onto the game itself. I did experience a few crashes, one of which was during the tutorial, which caused me to spend a few minutes trying to find the tutorial again because it kept trying to throw me straight into a level. Also, for a game that requires a lot of accurate button pressing, myself and a few of my friends found that there were a lot of moments where I would attempt a grind, only to go whizzing past it into a pylon. At first I put it down to me messing up the timing, but when I was pushing the analog stick a good 2-3 seconds prior to being level with it (you can push the analog stick to grind on objects before needing to, it just gets you fewer points) and I would still go whizzing past as if I pressed nothing and be forced to restart the level. Due to this, I found myself having to put it down before I snapped my PS Vita in half over my knee.

The music is… decent. Whilst some tracks are good, others made me want to blot my ears out with cotton balls. Some tracks get repetitive quite easily, especially when you hear them several times in one session. On the subject of repetition, I found the gameplay style eventually became very boring. Nothing new was introduced later in the game, and the only thing that stopped me from just using two buttons to beat all of the levels was the challenges, and they aren't even mandatory.

Overall, OlliOlli is a game that sounds good on paper, but in the end, doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong, OlliOlli is fun… for about 20 minutes. After that you realise you're just going through the same routine, except this time you’re flicking the analog stick a bit more than you were a few minutes ago. Only take this one if you’re really desperate for something to play when you’re on the bus.