Nuclear Delight • Ollie-Oops

Since picking it up with the previous Humble Bundle, I've played a surprising amount of OlliOlli, a 2D sidescrolling skateboard game. It's one of those simple-yet-addicting games that people end up sinking a lot of time into. With essentially all tricks assigned to different directions and motions with the left joystick (which actually allows for an impressive array of tricks), each one is theoretically uncomplicated to pull off successfully, but in my experience I've found that in practice this isn't always the case. The game won't always read the gestures you're attempting, which will result in the execution of a trick you didn't actually mean to do. Particularly when launching into a trick off of a grind, it seems that more often than not any degree of joystick rotation doesn't register very well, usually causing your character to perform a much more basic trick than you intended.

Since your score seems to be affected much more significantly by your combo multiplier and how well you land the trick (as opposed to its execution), it's hard to get too mad about this, since your choice of trick seems negligible in regard to your final score. However, when some challenges in various stages call for specific tricks to be performed, especially when a specific sequence of tricks is requested, it can get frustrating at times--not to mention that one of the game's achievements is successfully performing one of every trick in the game.

That said, the game is very fun and managing an extensive combo is very satisfying. But its simplistic nature does make its regular $13 price tag a bit hard to defend, especially when it kind of feels a bit like the sort of game you'd find on a mobile device. It might seem more reasonable if the game came with a level editor, which I think would be a great asset for a game like this, but as it stands I would suggest waiting for a sale if you're going to pick it up, unless you've got a lot of money you need to get rid of.