14 DAY TRIAL // 
OlliOlli belongs to an emerging breed of video games that hark back to the days when hardware limits and the nature of the business meant that games had bad gameplay and had to kill you in order to milk you of quarters. The good news is that now you've got another impossibly difficult arcade title to master; the bad news is that your youth is never coming back.
OlliOlli attempts to mix the flawless mechanical requirement of arcade classics with some fast-paced skateboarding action and rekindle the flame of the passion for the wonderful board on wheels that served as faithful companion and bully to countless people who now have less cartilage than they should in their knees and elbows.
Skateboarding games reached their prime with the EA Skate and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, high-budget titles that provided a wonderful experience, offering people who don't like to get hurt repeatedly while attempting to jump over a fire hydrant a window into the freedom and creativity of the sport.
The games also featured a nice chunk of licensed rap, pop-rock and even metal tracks to serve them as an atmospheric background to attempting to pull off a 900 Airwalk into a nose manual landing into a backside boardslide plus transfer finger flip benihana. That was very cool, because in real life doing a shove-it would land you in the hospital without a painstaking amount of training.
One of the defining characteristics of the experience was its arcade nature and open-world approach, where you could just stop and look around, plan your moves, then attempt to pull off impossible tricks. It was a truly enjoyable experience that wasn't difficult to pick up, but that had a lot of potential for improvement, and returning to one of the beginning stages once you mastered the moves would end up with severely different scores and completion times.
OlliOlli offers a different experience from that, one that resembles Super Meat Boy or a Super Mario Bros speedrun more than actual skateboarding. I expected a two-dimensional version of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and I ended up disappointed.
Behind the skateboarding premise and the pixelated visuals hides a driving force that wants to fool you into thinking that if you jump enough times, at one point you'll be able to defy gravity. From time to time, it gives you a nudge that makes you believe you're on the right track just enough to keep you playing, chasing that elusive moment of hope when you feel that you're on the brink of discovering an entirely new state of being.
Similar to how no Dark Souls fan puts down the controller long enough to ask the developers to come up with a decent control scheme on the PC, OlliOlli's fans won't be bothered by the fact that it's nigh impossible to play it using a keyboard.
But armed with a trusty gamepad, you'll be able to scrape the coating off the left analog stick while trying to convince the little skateboarder on the screen to grind one more rail and kickflip the board instead of just doing an ollie when a rail ends.
Curiously enough, the game requires that you press a button to land, but not at the precise time of landing, as one might assume, but just the instant before. Press it when you're too high and you'll get a wobbly landing, press it at what looks like the right time and you're already too late.
In an effort to spread further confusion and discombobulate players to an even greater degree, the button used for jumping is a completely separate one, and you don't first jump, then pull off tricks.
Rather, you swing the analog stick wildly while holding the firm belief that you did the right quarter of half circle motion required properly, then release it and hope that your little pixelated persona understood what kind of flip your wanted to perform.
Once you let go of the stick, your man jumps and hopefully does the trick, at which time you either time your landing button press or continue chaining moves together, by grinding on a rail, for instance.
Grinding is achieved by pressing the same stick into any direction and holding it down, which, of course, makes it increasingly difficult to perform a trick, because if you let go the skater jumps off the rail.
In addition to this, you can also throw in the shoulder buttons to pull off fancier stuff, as well as to rotate, but spinning does not work as you would normally guess. No, it's no "press button and here we go" affair, you have to press the button long enough but not too long, at just the right time, in order to get a spin in.
If this explanation makes playing the game seem like trying to open a devilishly complicated childproof pill bottle is because that's exactly how OlliOlli feels. If you take pleasure from learning the way a defective product works and pride yourself on the mastery of its skewed systems, then this little skating gem is right down your alley.
If you like a clean-cut interface and control scheme, and are more interested in exploring the offered world in your own way, with the focus on performing actual tricks, and trying to have fun and goof around, then OlliOlli is sadly not the game you are looking for.
On the other hand, if you fancy a very challenging and addictive experience that rewards patience and perseverance, you might find yourself in the game's grasp in no time.
The game has ridiculous controls, simplistic 2D pixel art, and tasks you with learning its levels by heart and perfecting the slew of tricks you can pull off in succession without bailing. There is no warning of when the side-scrolling level decides to break your bones, so in case you're not clairvoyant, you'll have to just get used to when you're supposed to jump and which obstacles are passable and which aren't.
The music, on the other hand, is very good and fitting the general theme of the game, feels urban, catchy and makes you want to keep moving.
Each chapter is set to a different background, and completing a level also unlocks a Spot, a single-combo score challenge that ends the moment you land on the ground. In addition to this, fully completing a set of goals unlocks the Pro version of the level, which means that between progressing through the campaign, Pro levels and Daily Grind Challenge, there's always something to do in OlliOlli.
The Good
- Challenging
- Some people might find it rewarding
- Good sountrack
- Classic arcade gameplay
- It has mechas and Godzilla
The Bad
- Too difficult
- Frustrating controls
- Not actually about skateboarding
- It makes you want to smash your keyboard
Conclusion
Instead of a learning curve, you're hit with a brick wall, and just like Hotline Miami, OlliOlli demands that you repeat the same level over and over until the right twitches become second nature, and makes sure that they are beat into you the hard way.
Although its theme is skateboarding, it's got nothing in common with the old high-profile skating games. Instead of being able to roll off and mess around with stuff or just experiment, jumping over bums, you are constantly struggling, ever so slightly improving, tested by the game's demanding and unforgiving systems.
Some people though find immense relief in attaining the pointlessly difficult goals of a contrived video game. If you think that being able to solve a Rubik's Cube in 5 seconds while blindfolded is something rewarding, you'll definitely enjoy OlliOlli. If you just want to pull off some tricks, look elsewhere.
