OlliOlli World is a challenging but joyous celebration of skateboarding

polygon.com:

I want to ascend to Gnarvana — to meet the gods of skateboarding that built a world around the sport and its culture. I want to prove my skill and become Radlandia’s next Skate Wizard.

In OlliOlli World, the third entry in developer Roll7’s skating series, the current Skate Wizard, Chiffon, is retiring, and the world needs a new link to the skate gods. She and a crew of skaters ride through the world with me to showcase my worth, moving through different skate biomes, including a cotton candy-colored beach; sandy deserts where I grind bones; dense woodlands with friendly bees; and crowded factories where skateboards get made.

OlliOlli World builds on the intense, skill-based gameplay of the first two games, but also widens scope, showcasing how skateboard culture has evolved in recent years. It’s still a game about perfecting a wide skill set, but it’s also a more inclusive experience, in everything from its world to its expansive social options. It’s fantastic, joyous, and at times devastatingly difficult, but not so hard that I ever wanted to stop playing.

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With OlliOlli World, Roll7 has pivoted toward a colorful, surrealist art style that’s more similar to Adventure Time than a pixelated Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. OlliOlli World also uses a 2.5D perspective to allow for things like branching routes and wall-riding. It’s a friendlier take on OlliOlli and OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood, both of which were punishing in their gameplay. The big difference here is that it’s much harder to outright fail in OlliOlli World; I largely stay on my board unless I’ve crashed into something or fallen into a gap. (Mind you, that still does happen pretty often.)

The general objective is to simply survive each level, using