OlliOlli (Xbox One) Review

OlliOlli focuses almost entirely on the player grinding away through its fairly lengthy single-player career. The game is broken up into five different environments (city, port, and so on), each containing ten stages and every level having five different star challenges of varying difficulty. The goal is to reach the end of the level to unlock the next one while, at the same time, trying to complete a range of star objectives. The challenges are fairly generic and follow roughly the same principles: maximum score, total point combination, performing certain tricks, or collecting specific objects in the map.

As progress through the levels is made, gamers will stumble (literally, in some cases!) across various objects that need to be jumped over and grinded along to build up a high score. It's just a matter of learning the various tricks and linking them all together in one sweet, point-filled combination. Unfortunately, though, the world of OlliOlli is littered with trash and dozens of staircases, making life ever so more difficult in the process. If any of these objects are hit, the character bails and bounces endlessly across everything in their path, causing a reset and the need to start again from the beginning of the stage (thankfully an almost instant event).

The controls are frustrating and the tutorial really doesn't make the difficulty curve in OlliOlli any easier. It teaches the absolute basics of performing ollies and grinding, and then it's down to the player to figure out the rest by endlessly browsing the trick book. Also, being forced to press A every time a trick is landed is one of the dumbest things possible - it's just unnecessary, making what is an already tough game even harder. Don't press A? Well, good luck ever hitting the maximum score/point combination challenges as without hitting that button, landings will be sloppy, earning practically no points.

One of the most important requirements for any skateboarding game is, of course, how it controls and OlliOlli is a damn tricky beast to tackle in this respect. Controllers today have a dozens of different inputs but OlliOlli focuses almost entirely on the left stick for everything; ollies, flip tricks, grinds, the whole lot. Sound confusing? Well, it certainly is. It's fairly simple to get the grasp of the absolute rudimentary controls but the difficulty curve is just brutal. The first few stages are incredibly tame but almost as soon as the next environment is unlocked, prepare to struggle.

OlliOlli revolves entirely around the single-player experience, yet the minor multiplayer game mode it contains is a really interesting concept. Every day a new challenge is available for 24 hours where the player has to set the highest combo score they can. As many practice runs as desired are permitted, but only one actual run is allowed, which will then be posted to the leaderboards. If that isn't enough, each stage in the single-player has spot challenges where there is a set the goal of earning as many points in that area, and then comparing it to friends' scores at any time.