OlliOlli World developed by Roll7 is the third installment in a series of games made for the skateboarder’s heart. These games have always been technical and challenging but previous iterations were limited by the technology of their time. OlliOlli World has been able to keep all that was fun and popular with its series while still evolving into a beautiful cartoon world with fun characters and gameplay that can be picked up by anyone!
In the land of…
We begin the story with the land of Radlandia. A ridiculous and fun name of a world that revolves around skateboarding. Every character has their own quirks, appearance, and personality bringing the story and world to life.
In Radlandia, they have what is called a skating wizard which is a chosen one to be the best skateboarder. After years pass, it’s time to find a new wizard while the old one prepares for retirement. That’s where you come in as a fresh new face and amateur skateboarder dedicated to becoming the next wizard.
A world of Ooooo and wonder
Creating your character was immediately fun since the art style in OlliOlli World reminds me so much of Adventure Time and Steven Universe. Bright, colorful pastels and crazy character and clothing designs. Each character in the story has a unique look that somehow fits very well with their personality. When in character create mode, you can make your character as plain or as eccentric as you’d like. I made mine look like a colorful emo kid with a blue Mohawk then changed it to an old hipster man…if that even makes sense.
There are a ton of customization options. Eyes, ears, mouth, nose, hats, facial hair, piercings, and more. I also appreciate the inclusion of choosing male or female while still being able to wear the clothing of either gender. The more inclusion in games, the better. More importantly, you can customize your skateboard. You can change the trucks, wheels, and board for starters. Even better is that you can go back and change everything whenever you’d like for more weird and stylized looks. More games should offer the option to change appearances on the fly.
Challenging but fair
Starting with the tutorial, it’s optional. It starts you off slow and easy while still giving you challenges/side missions if you want to give yourself a challenge. I loved the options given to me right in the beginning. I could make the tutorial as hard or easy as I wanted while still learning the basics.
Once that is out of the way, the real fun begins. Again, OlliOlli World is great and guides you as fast or as slow as possible while the difficulty ramps up. It will introduce ramps, stairs, grinding, and wall runs while throwing more side missions at you for optional trials. The side missions range from doing multi-trick combos, avoiding the use of checkpoints, avoiding certain collectibles or obstacles in a level, and more. These challenges offer a range of unlockable items to customize yourself and your skateboard more.
What’s that? Do you want more challenges? You can’t have a skateboarding game without leaderboards! So of course, this game has that as well. On my playthrough, the leaderboard scores were ridiculously high so I could never achieve such a feat. While doable, I hope you practice hard to make it to the top. That’s one of the great things about a skills-based game like OlliOlli World. The more I practiced, the more I felt like I had progressed. Never have I felt the difficulty curve was unfair or abrupt… but I did fail a lot. The game was hard but always fair.
There were many intense, edge-of-your-seat levels where I felt defeated but that was only because I chose to complete the extra challenges as perfectly as possible. Players have a choice to literally just do the bare minimum to complete each level and progress if you liked, and that’s OK. OlliOlli World and its move sets are very technical. They even have a move list to help you with directional movements. Anyone can ignore them to do simple jumps, kicks, and grinds to get by if that’s more your speed. It’s all up to the player on how they want to experience the game. You won’t unlock much of anything, but the option is there. The addition of checkpoints helps as well so you don’t have to start all over.
Is it everlasting fun?
The short answer…it depends. For those who love skateboarding and are perfectionists, there’s a lot to explore in OlliOlli World. Challenges and leaderboards keep you motivated to make it to the top while still unlocking cool new looks and boards. If that isn’t enough for you, you may go through the game once and never have to play it again. What I do hope for is some future DLC, or at the very least a level creator so others can play along.
This review was written based on a digital review copy of OlliOlli World for the PlayStation 5 provided by Private Division and Roll7.
