OlliOlli is a 2D side-scrolling skateboarding game, with the goal being to make it from one end of a level to another in one-piece. Your skater constantly moves along the screen, and you navigate by ollieing and grinding your way through levels.
You use the left stick to do all the tricks. Pressing down and releasing will perform an ollie, and pressing A just before you land will give you a perfect landing. Grinding is as simple and just pressing a direction above the rail.
Not pressing A, or mistiming it gives you a sloppy landing which means you barely get any points despite your amazing combo beforehand. I was unsure how the landing mechanic worked because the tutorial makes out you need to press it as you land, but often I pressed it way before and it seemed to work just fine. It seemed pretty inconsistent though.
Intuitively, I found this game hard to play. In my mind I wanted to jump, so I kept on pressing A which is a standard button for platforming games. Then when I wanted to land, I either didn’t press anything or pressed down instead. It was quite hard to retrain my mind to this new way of thinking.
If you “bail” then you fail the level. This happens if you plough into obstacles rather than jumping over them, running over certain textures (eg piles of snow), or running out of momentum whilst on a rail. When you are on the ground, you can tap A to speed up.
Many levels require constant trial-and-error because some areas require fairly precise timing to land, then quickly jump over an obstacle. Usually the most complicated chains of these occur early in the levels, as if the game designer realised it was the best place to avoid too much frustration.
In each level, you are given some objectives such as: achieving a total score, combo score, collecting some items, making certain jumps, or performing certain tricks. Getting to the end of the level unlocks the next one, so the objectives are optional and just count to your star rating.
The graphics are pretty basic. The character is well-animated but many of the ground images are primitive. On occasion, it was hard to distinguish between background and foreground objects.
I like the concept of the game, but I often found it frustrating to play. This is partially down to me, but I was convinced the game sometimes didn’t respond to my inputs. There was also a strange bug where you don’t seem to land on the surface, and instead partially pass through, then bail soon after. This happens fairly frequently; maybe 1 in 30 attempts.