The further you progress into the game, the more it compounds the “ don’t forget to do this/make sure you don’t do that” complexity to the point where it’s safe to say that the control scheme is unique and possibly enough to put some people off. Inversely, if you tilt the analog when attempting to land on the ground rather than, or as well as, pressing the A button, it will be counted as a failure… unless, of course, you want to land in a manual. If you do, and press the A button, the grind will not connect and you will fall, either to the floor breaking any combo you may have had going, and registering that trick as a sloppy one providing there is a surface to drop to. However, you must NOT consider this as a form of landing. The better the time, the more chance of getting a speed boost to keep your combo going. The timing of this, much like landing itself, is carefully measured. For instance, to grind, not unlike launching a trick or a simple ollie, you tilt the left analog, only this time you keep the analog tilted as your trucks find their mark. It’s a sign that the level needs to be restarted.Īs you make your way through Olliwood, extra mechanical layers are thrown on top of landing that conflict with your already strained sense of coordination. To my mind, that’s about as good as not having done it in the first place. You can flick the analog stick as many times as you like, but if you don’t then press A at just the right time upon returning to the ground, your landing will be considered “Sloppy”. In many ways the core mechanic of OlliOlli 2. Therein lies what these guys have identified as a problem thus far. You wouldn’t stand up and cheer at a football game because a player simply kicked the ball in the general direction of the goal, right? It has to go in too. Having spent a few years on a deck myself in my teenage years, it makes a lot of sense for landing a trick to be as much a part of the overall trick as launching it. And so began a process of learning what could potentially be an off putting aspect to some players – that everything I knew about skateboarding games was wrong, and that getting creative with what is considered to be the standards of control schemes can add a LOT of depth to a game, while not only not breaking the experience, but making it all the richer.īefore long, I began to come around to the idea, even justifying the decisions made at Roll7. Being of the legion of us that grew up with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, I had my preconceived notions of how a skateboarding game should control and, by the looks of things, Roll7 had every intention of exploiting that ignorance and proving me wrong as I fell after trying an ollie, fell after descending a set of stairs, and even then fell onto a worryingly placed collection of spikes. Shrewdly done, this momentary consternation was a sign of things to come as I eagerly launched myself into career mode and instantly found myself welcomed by a control scheme that this reviewer can only describe as “ I don’t get it!”. A game that has three core values in its design: precision, simplistic complexity and timing.įrom the moment I hit the main menu, Roll7 showed me that the inbound control scheme was going to be… peculiar by making Y – at times – translate into the menus as moving to a subsequent page, rather than the button I typically expect, A (I plug an Xbox controller into my PC). It didn’t take me long to discover that what I should have expected was EXACTLY the type of game I enjoy most. It may be something of challenge to get through the bias here, but in my defense, the opening paragraph should be evidence enough that I had no idea what I was getting myself in for when I first launched OlliOlli 2: Welcome To Olliwood. As I’m sure many would agree, sometimes games can slip past you… and boy did this little gem do exactly that. Around the time of the first iteration’s release I had heard about it, saw snippets of gameplay and even noticed it brought up in conversation to the sound of some rather favourable testimonials. I must confess to a level of ignorance when it comes to OlliOlli as a series.
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