

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.
#OLLIOLLI SCREEN PROBLEM PRO#
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.
