OlliOlli

I'd equate OlliOlli to all those cellphone runner games, where you go down a path and avoid obstacles. Only this time, instead of running, you're on a skateboard. Meaning OlliOlli isn't a true skateboarding game. Tricks are easy to perform, and require no knowledge whatsoever - only buttom mashing. There's no difference in difficulty (at least using a keyboard) between an ollie and a salad grind, or a 360 flip. So there's no fun in landing a difficult trick. Levels are also fairly repetitive - each level seems to consist of a series of grindable surfaces, with very little flat ground in between. So most of the time you'll just jump from grindable surface to grindable surface, throwing a flip in between, with maybe a 180 or 360 spin for some extra points. To make the levels last longer, you're given a series of things to do in each level - collect a certain number of points overall, string tricks together to reach a certain number of points, grind certain surfaces, or collect items scattered throughout the level. It does turn each level from a level you'd spend a few minutes in, to a level you might spend an hour in just to complete each task. But the problem with that, is that each level seems to have almost the same exact challenges. There's just very little one can do in a sidescrolling skateboard game. And a lot of those challenges are easy to complete, since you don't need to complete them all at once. Most of them, you don't even need to finish the level to complete. If you need to perform a certain trick, you can do it at the start of a level, not finish the level, and it'd still count. A difficulty setting would have been nice. The game seems to also suffer from some minor bugs from time to time - like the game not registering key presses sometimes, and not even registering me pressing a button with the mouse. And from time to time the game would suffer a slowdown at the start of a level, usually making me wipeout. But maybe that only happens to me.

I bought this arcade skateboarding game as part of HumbleBundle. Your objective is skating as far as you can along short, but somewhat demanding levels featuring stairs, grinds, vehicles, obstacles. Along the level you get scores for tricks, grinds and combos. With 8 key controls the game seems to be easy, but it is relatively unforgiving, which makes you wanna beat it. I mean, how many times can you smash your face into the floor just after landing an epic 20x combo?! After a few minutes you can play the game and after 1-2 hours you get to know more tricks and are able to get quite impressive scores. The game features classic 8-bit arcade graphics style and urban music floating between trance, hip-hop and dubstep (no vocals). Is it fun? Yes it is. You want to win the level. You want to land the combo. You want to beat your friends' score online (there are leaderboards). The graphics is retro-cool (but at times too simplistic and repetitive) and the music creates right skateboarding mood. At the same time it is a little annoying, especially after multiple failures. Despite easy controls I tend to mix up the keys in the heat of the moment. Music is good, but it just runs in the background, isn't related to levels or your activity/performance. Some levels are repetive, but the in-game achievements vary from level to level. There are multiple themes including city, port and junkyard. Some are better than others, for example in port the lack of detail on the floor makes it difficult to estimate your current speed. There are some bugs. The game crashed for me once. It is a nice little game definitely worth getting in some bundle. Depending on how much you like arcade games you will have 5-20 hours of fun until it gets a little boring. GRAPHICS: 6/10 AUDIO: 7/10 GAMEPLAY: 7/10

This game is pretty cool and very adicting, with nice graphics and a acceptable soundtrack but some tricks are almost impossible to perform on keyboard.

The game requires such precise timing that I can't even pass the tutorial. One star for actually having a tutorial...

Pretty game. I suppose, that there is a sense of this game -- if it would be easy to control skater -- it will be not interesting.