OlliOlli2: XL Edition Review

If you’ve been a gamer during the last twenty years, you will have witnessed the rise and fall of the skating genre. During the Playstation one era, the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Series brought skateboarding to the forefront of gaming, perfectly capturing the attitude and personality of the sport, before descending down a spiral of expensive peripherals and the recent disappointing comeback.

Aside from EA’s Skate series – which has been dormant since 2010 – the skating genre has mostly been disappointingly stagnant for some time. That was until early 2014 and the release of Roll7’s surprise indie hit, Olli Olli.

With the first game’s success, a sequel was released on PS4 and Playstation Vita in 2015 as a timed exclusive. And so, just over a year later, the Xbox One has received an updated edition. As part of Xbox’s parity clause, to make up for the later release date, this XL edition features additional content not available in previous versions. The new Free skate mode offers five new, extra-long levels to play through, allowing you to take it easy and perfect your flipping and grinding skills while Combo Rush, the local multiplayer mode, allows you to compete against friends trying to rack up the highest score.

Olli Olli 2 brings back the brilliant formula of the original game while updating it with new tricks. You can now use manuals, reverts and grind-switches to create more varied and exciting combos. Controlling similarly to the Skate games, focusing on precision timing and analogue-stick rotation, Olli Olli 2 features an in depth, yet accessible, trick system that allows beginners to easily jump in and skate while offering a nice challenge for those who want to complete the perfect line. Challenges for each level push you to experiment, trying increasingly difficult manoeuvres that will significantly increase your score when tied into the perfect combo.

Learning the basics, as well as some of the more complicated manoeuvres, couldn’t be simpler as the ‘Skate-Park’ offers basic training in some of the fundamentals while the Tricktionary offers a guide on all of the tricks and the appropriate controls. Including these into the game serves as a nice tutorial for those who perhaps missed out on the original game or those who just can’t quite seem to hit that move they want just right.

The main mode of the game has you working through five varied worlds; you’ll skate through the movie world of Olliwood, Aztec ruins and a Haunted Carnival as well as a couple of other locations. While your primary objective is always the same, the aesthetic differences give each level its own personality rather than focusing on boring urban environments. As you skate, using everything you have learnt, the fluid animation of your character makes combos look natural and, even when pulling off fairly simple combos, makes you look like a total bad-ass.

There is a good selection of levels here, twenty-five main areas as standard, but those who complete all challenges on a level can unlock additional Pro levels. For those looking to get their score into the millions, these Pro levels are the perfect place to really test your skills while those who just want to focus on getting to the end of the main levels can do just that and still get their money’s worth out of the game.

Olli Olli 2 nicely includes a few multiplayer options. The previously mentioned split screen mode offers a fun way to play with friends or family, while online functionality allows you to post high scores on leaderboards or compete in daily challenges against people from all over the world, because, honestly, what’s the point of being an awesome skater if you can’t boast about it, right?  

While Olli Olli 2 doesn’t exactly innovate and mix it up too much from the previous game, its focus on refinement and including new techniques makes for a fun, often challenging game that breathes a new lease of life into an otherwise dying genre.