You can do as much or as little as you want. You never encounter negative people, or find yourself goaded into competition. The skate wizard story and its characters are consistent reminders that this is about the experience, rather than your score. It's not an especially deep story and the characters mostly hang around to be funny and cute, but these little additions pair well with the generalized sense that OlliOlli World is a game about having some relaxed fun, regardless of how intensely you get into it. There are a variety of other skaters to meet along the way who, along with your small crew of companions, mostly exist to encourage you. You travel around the skateboarding haven of Radlandia with the goal of honing your skills to become the next skate wizard-a sort of skater guru who brings balance between the people of Radlandia and the heavenly skate gods who created the land. The other major change from earlier OlliOlli games is that this one has characters and a narrative, although it's fairly thin. And that's a change that makes OlliOlli World all the more fun and inviting, and encourages skill-building even more. It can still be a tough, challenging game that tests your skateboarding skills and timing along the way, but it's not so hard that the difficulty tends to act as a gatekeeper. It's possible to finish the game without ever really leaning into the most advanced moves or challenges the game has to offer, and the removal of the landing requirement to stay standing makes it fully reasonable to complete the game even if you're not an OlliOlli pro. Roll7 has said that, with OlliOlli World, it was looking to make a more welcoming entry in the series, and this certainly hits that mark. If you do hit the right timing on a landing, you earn bonus points for your run's score. You still have to hold the analog stick in a certain direction to execute a grind, and hitting stairs or an obstacle, for instance, will trip you up. Instead, your character automatically lands almost all of their tricks, provided you're coming down on a flat, stable surface. The landing timing still exists in OlliOlli World, but it's not essential for actually staying on your board. Blow it, and you'd blow the trick, falling and forcing a reset. In older OlliOlli games, however, the most important part of it all was the landing, which you'd have to stick by pressing a button in time with your character hitting the ground. As your tricks get more advanced, they also become more complex, with grinds also requiring you to push the left analog stick, grabs added to the right stick, and spins on the shoulder buttons. As in the series' earlier games, tricks are performed by moving your controller's left analog stick in specific ways, not too unlike the special moves of a fighting game. OlliOlli World, somewhat mercifully, pulls back those demands. In the past, OlliOlli games have tried to focus on the technical difficulty of skateboarding, translating that into button movements on a controller that require precise actions and timing. Developer Roll7's top-flight level design makes this a game that supports a variety of approaches to playing it, improving on the things that were fun about the earlier games in the franchise, while opening up the formula to new ideas. Or, you can make the game feel as hardcore as its predecessors, the often-punishing 2D arcade skaters OlliOlli and OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood. You can take the more carefree approach, nailing tricks here and there and just enjoying the ride, since merely getting to the end of a level allows you to advance to the next. What makes OlliOlli World so good is that it manages to nail that balance, providing a bunch of different experiences even on the same course. The balance between chill and intense, between losing yourself in the skating flow and feeling like you need to check off every challenge the game can throw at you, is a precarious one. It's a game that invites you in with catchy music and a lighthearted art style, but can quickly make time evaporate as you fight to complete one last challenge, hit one last high score, or beat one last rival. Send your cartoony character careening down one of its brightly colored 2.5D skateboarding courses and you might find yourself trying again and again to nail a tough jump, or discover the right pathway to slip into a background portion of the level and unveil new secrets. It's easy to drop an hour or two into OlliOlli World without even realizing it.
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