Platform: Vita Publisher: Sony Developer: Roll7 Release: out now
Roll7′s Vita exclusive proves that 2D remains the platform game’s true home. Seeing the horizontal cross-section of a level scrolling by makes safe landing zones legible. Like every other skateboarding game ever made, the goal is to string together as many tricks and combos as you can manage, maximising your score tally, but the twist here is that only elevated grinds keep your combo multiplier climbing. The second your wheels reluctantly hit the ground, your accumulated score is cashed in, but only if you hit the X button right as you make contact. The more precise your timing with that button press, the closer you’ll come to sticking a perfect landing and netting the maximum score boost.
To step onto a skateboard deck is to see the built world as a tangle of unwitting level design. It’s tempting to think those angular stone benches in your town square were plonked next to that descending staircase rail by special providence, inviting you to draw a skating line like a needle pulling thread, stitching all the various architectural features into a tricksy whole. The beauty of OlliOlli’s design is that it takes this fantasy that next logical step forward into the realm of absurdity. If you can grind on a rail, why not along the rotor blade of an assault helicopter parked inside a Russian military base in the dead of winter?
Despite being a skating game, OlliOlli’s design feels more genetically akin to Adam Saltsman’s Canabalt than Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. There’s a relentless, anxiety-laced forward motion to your progress through each level, but it’s not a constant velocity. Between tricks you can press the X button to push off with a foot to get back up to cruising speed, while extended rail grinds diminish your momentum, threatening to disrupt the combo string unless you can time your landing perfectly on a sequential rail, which provides a modest speed increase. Pressing and holding the left stick in any direction just before your airborne rider crosses the plain of an onscreen rail will cause the board to catch its target and initiate a grind. There’s an immensely gratifying tactile sense in the friction of the board as it scrapes along each surface like a knife blade hugging the sharpening wheel.
There’s a vast stockpile of tricks to pull off – north of 120 if you count both tricks and grinds – but due to the relatively small size of the rider on the Vita’s screen, we’d be hard pressed to differentiate one from another if pressed. The granular distinctions between each trick are mostly lost on the untrained eye. Additionally, the fact that the game is cagey about how trick difficulty and variety translates into actual score means that, when you’re travelling at speed and distracted with basic platforming concerns, deciding between dozens of tricks in real time becomes more arbitrary than strategic.
In general hardware terms, it’s impossible to overstate the competition-shaming elegance of the Vita’s analogue sticks, and OlliOlli offers the most satisfying proof of concept yet. As puerile as the inescapable analogy may be, there’s a ‘fondle factor’ to any sort of physical input scheme, which is partly why controller-free Kinect gaming found zero apologists. Pulling off tricks in OlliOlli – each precision twist, rotation and flick of the Vita’s left analogue stick – feels as satisfying for your fingers to negotiate as any fighting game finishing move. So even if you’re terrible at the game, even if you can’t land a single trick or grind, even if your scores barely creep into triple digits, your avatar’s tumbling faceplant will still imprint the outline of a grinning mouth in the pavement.
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