But then you want to advanced-trick through a Ghost, don't you? Optional challenges tug you into seeing the level you just battled over as a series of fresh possibilities. OlliOlli World is a case in point: at first you just have to get to the end of each level. Throw in branching routes, inventive screen furniture and new skills - some of them delivered surprisingly late, like stair-riding - that send you back to earlier courses to uncover new routes, and you already have a game with a huge heart: a skateboarding, platforming, memory-testing epic.īut this is a skating game, and these games are always two games in one. Some of the runs by themselves are heart-stopping, chaining grinds and barriers and wall-dashes together in proper Morse-code blasts of dexterity and panic. It's beautiful and interesting and detailed. But more than that there's the gravelly run of wheels on seamed concrete and the click and clack of boards in motion. The perfect tunes for the cocktail lounge of a Holiday Inn perched on the rings of Saturn, which might as well be where everything takes place anyway.

The soundtrack, meanwhile, comes across like the Wii's OS music covered by Mr Scruff and Statues-era Moloko: squidgy, chirpy, cheeky, zappy. Later on there's a sci-fi cityscape with truly epic drops and some brutal chains of wall-riding. My favourite area is probably the factory stage where you race over production lines and duck toxic sludge, sometimes skating on a moving platform. It's beautifully done: pen doodles converging with cartoon seagulls and dense, oaky forests. The game is still broken down into bespoke runs or levels, but those levels are knotted together to tell a story, to form a series of proper oddball places you move through. You may move in and out of the screen a little, somehow never sacrificing readability. There will be half-pipes that push you back the way you came, but on a different thread. You will have points in a run where you can switch tracks, say, hopping from this route to that route, and maybe that route curls up and over and threads through the first. Models and assets are 3D, but the world bucks away from the 2D plane a bit as well. OlliOlli World, meanwhile, kicks things into Cel-shaded 3D, with wobbly, squishy, flappy characters embarking on a gorgeously silly adventure across cartoonish ice-cream coloured landscapes. Pixelart on the first outing I think, and then smooth Hoxton ad agency vectors for the second: Bonanza Bros backdrops frozen in the instant of a perfect sunset. Yet it's all expanded! The first two OlliOllis were truly 2D affairs, scrapbook flat. You don't need to press a button to land properly anymore - though you still can if you're fancy - and I feel like the push button may have moved places, but basically, on wheels, this is the same beautiful thing it always was. Anyway, this is the juddering, racing, crunching heart of OlliOlli and it remains, as I said, unchanged here. Harder - for me at least - to internalise. Harder to do in a rush, and you're always in a rush here. Hold the stick and then do a quarter turn - or more than a quarter turn. Can you land it? Can you link it together with other tricks? Can you incorporate a grab? Whatever.īut advanced tricks build on that with a bit of Street Fighter 2. You hold and then release the stick in order to trick: choose a direction and see what happens. Back in 2014, Roll7 devised a stick-flicking system that seemed to capture skateboarding in the very joints - in the knees and ankles, and in the moment at which the human body becomes a lively species of car jack or shock absorber. The basics have remained unchanged for obvious reasons. OlliOlli World is the latest and wildest entry in a sublime series of 2D skateboarding games. Watch on YouTube The OlliOlli World reveal trailer. Back to the tutorial I had sped through hours before and forgotten, back to the heart of the advance tricks system to gain a proper understanding of these beautiful, terrible things. I had to do something that, in a game with the sheer headlong pelt of OlliOlli World, seems like breaking an underlying law.

All levels here have optional challenges, but that ghost! I realised I definitely wanted to trick through it, to advance-trick through it even! So I had to do what I so rarely choose to do in games. Availability: Out on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch on the 8th of Feb.Publisher: Private Division, Take Two Interactive.But then Logfolk Graveyard came along with the optional challenge: Advance trick through a Ghost.

I had been zooming through OlliOlli World until that point - always cheery, sometimes doing well, sometimes just scraping it. In a game where time can become a bright fizzing blur, I somehow remember the exact moment. A thrilling leap forward for a magical skating series.

Olliolli ps4