Earlier this year, our own Mike Splechta took a look at OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood when it hit Vita and PS4 in March. He called it “practically the 2D version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2,” citing the addition of manuals for longer combos and the ludicrous amount of content. The game is now available on Steam, and you can breathe easy knowing it’s just as brilliant as the earlier releases.
Like the first title, OlliOlli 2 has you skating from left to right across winding 2D parks littered with grind rails and other gimmicks. The emphasis this time is on chaining long combos, a possibility afforded by the aforementioned manual. Land a manual, and you can keep your chain going even on regular ground. Do this perfectly and you can even make your combo last the duration of an entire level, sending your score skyrocketing into the millions.
In addition to chasing high scores, you can also go after challenges. There are five of these on each level, and they encompass everything from hitting grind markers to performing certain tricks. These add a lot of replay value, especially when you factor in the insane amount of content to unlock: beat the five challenges in an Amateur stage and you’ll unlock the corresponding Pro stage, which comes with five more challenges of its own and a slew of new obstacles to avoid. Beat the five Pro challenges, and you’ll earn the ability to play the stage on RAD Mode, which is — as you might expect — unbelievably brutal.
As great as all that sounds, even beating some of the Amateur levels can be a trying task; the five unique worlds take place on “Olliwood” movie sets, completely upping the ante on the ridiculousness factor. There are a ton of obstacles in your way this time, particularly in the Pro levels, and you’re going to crash and burn more than a few times before you get the hang of each one.
Even with this added difficulty, the pitch-perfect controls and buttery-smooth gameplay ensure failure is the fault of the player, and the experience never devolves into frustration. As before, it’s worth praising just how much mileage the game gets out of its simple control scheme. If you’re playing with a gamepad (this reviewer used his trusty Xbox One controller), you can pull off tricks with a mere flick of the analog stick. It’s about as intuitive as it gets, and it feels fantastic. Your keyboard can still get the job done, but the effect is not nearly as potent.
There are a couple extra modes if you’re feeling competitive. Spots challenge you to take a single combo as far as you can go; your high score will be added to a leaderboard, both for the individual stage and a cumulative “ultimate” score that includes all the levels. Combo Rush is the game’s only true multiplayer option, a local-only split-screen tournament mode that allows a lot of flexibility in its options. It’s great pick-up-and-play fun, even if it stuffs you into a tiny corner of the screen.
OlliOlli 2 looks and sounds excellent. The colors are bright and soft, the animations are fluid, and the level of detail in the background is astounding. The game ditches the pixel art style of its predecessor in favor of a cleaner, more contemporary look, and this reviewer personally found it a welcome change. The soundtrack is top-notch, too, serving up chill, upbeat tunes that provide the perfect backdrop to your skating activities.
If you don’t already have access to OlliOlli 2 on a PS4 or Vita, this version is a perfect way to get your skate on. It controls like a dream, it’s chock-full of unlockables, and it looks and sounds absolutely brilliant. For high score chasers, it doesn’t get much better than this.
