The player character is fully customizable, with otherworldly skin tones (my skater is bright yellow), hairstyles, and dozens of unlockable accessories, including boards, shirts, shoes, dresses, headwear, and more. Courses are awash in color, and characters have vibrant and funky designs that hone in on skating’s celebration of self-expression.
The story is largely inconsequential, but it’s full of colorful characters that really capture the diversity of skate culture-while also highlighting the wackiness of this game’s world. The skate wizard shreds above all and serves as the link between people and the five otherworldly skate Godz (yeah, with a “z”). The player character is trying out to become the new skate wizard, who is retiring.
OlliOlli World takes place in Radlandia, a fictional world where skateboarding is common practice among the people. The world itself is one of the game’s biggest highlights.
By making the jump from 2D to 2.5D, this series is able to make slight yet radical additions that change how players interact with its world and environments-and it’s thrilling. The game also introduces new features like half-pipes and wall riding that give runs a bit more dimension, literally. While they all have a predetermined endpoint, many courses in this game feature optionals paths (called “Gnarly Routes”) that generally offer an increased challenge in exchange for more point opportunities and bigger thrills. Where courses in past games were straight paths with one way of progressing (and maybe a secret route here and there), OlliOlli World brings the series more or less into the third dimension in more ways than one. Characters celebrate your rad moves, and it gives World a breeziness and air of acceptance that is lacking in many titles with a sense of competition. This is a celebration of skating in all its forms no matter what your score is at the end of a run, the game never shames you or puts you down. Mechanics like manuals, landings, and performing tricks are very precise but never unfair, and they’re rolled out steadily. Trying to optimize every inch of the course to maximize your score? You can do that too. Want to just go through the course as quickly as possible using only a few tools? Go for it. OlliOlli World has mechanics that make it easy to pick up and play, and functional enough to meet players wherever they are. Players will push, jump, grind, grab, and trick their way to high score glory. By iterating on gameplay that was already near-flawless and choosing to focus mainly on how it’s implemented and presented, World sets itself apart from almost any other sports title in existence. What makes this game such a standout, however, is OlliOlli World’s exceptional presentation and execution. OlliOlli World on paper holds many similarities to these first two games-players still find themselves skating across numerous courses, using all the tricks and moves at their disposal to rack up the highest possible score. Their simple sprite graphics were charming, and there were hints of some real personality there-especially in Welcome to Olliwood, a favorite of mine-but for the most part they were slight, small games with an emphasis on replayability and perfection. The first games in the series, OlliOlli and OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood, were minimalist, retro skating games presented in 2D that tasked players with completing courses while generating the highest possible score. Skating just has a power to it, and when a game really taps into that, we get something special-and OlliOlli World is special.
Similarly, skateboarding games are some of the most beloved in the sports genre, with games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and the Skate series still holding large followings despite mediocre and/or nonexistent sequels.
Skateboarding is an activity loved by many around the world-it transcends culture, country, and class by focusing on self-expression.