Much like skateboarding itself, the original OllOlli proved that there’s plenty of room for individual expression within the skateboarding genre. It hit the Vita with a fresh perspective, demonstrating just how great technical street skating could be in 2D. OlliOlli 2 blows that first effort out of the water on every level.

This is developer Roll7’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. Like that landmark game, OlliOlli 2 introduces the manual, bringing a whole new dimension to the gameplay. It works in much the same way, letting you land in a manual out of any trick and thus keep your combo going, opening up the possibility of beating each level in a single monster trick.

Bluntslides are cool, but OlliOlli 2 introduces new tricks like darkslides.

Each of OlliOlli 2’s levels are short gauntlets, jam-packed with stair sets, rails, ramps, deadly obstacles and – in the case of the Titan Sky levels – towering robots, hovercars, and toxic ooze. The skating is pure and skill-based. Forget steering: this is a left-to-right stream of skating consciousness, where you’re flowing gracefully from one mini set piece to the next, attempting to commune with the clever level design and trick mechanics.

Flip tricks and grinds are the main tools of your trade. The former are triggered with a flick or swirl of the left analogue stick (potentially with a shoulder button held down if it’s particularly complex). So far, so similar. The innovation is that you need to catch the trick to land it, and the later you catch it, the better the rating you get – from sloppy to perfect. Tap X (or X and left or right for a manual) just before you hit the ground and you’ll be awarded a ‘perfect’ landing.

Grinds are a little looser to execute, only requiring holding in one of four directions (again, potentially with one or more shoulder buttons as modifiers), but the same timing applies: move and hold the analogue stick at the last second and you’ll get a perfect rating, this time accompanied by green sparks and a speed boost.

Perfect ratings mean a faster-climbing multiplier for trick combos, but they also factor into the level design in a pretty major way. Once you’re a chunk of the way through the career mode, you’ll come across grind sequences that aren’t possible to beat unless you nail the timing, or score goals that require switching grinds on the fly – which is only possible with a perfectly timed initial grind. You’ll also be required to use perfectly timed tricks off ramps to boost to the next section… or wind up broken and battered on the spikes below.

The aforementioned spikes below.

Thankfully, OlliOlli 2 doesn’t demand that of you initially. In fact, it gives you plenty of time to get a feel for the systems and get your eye in. By the time it starts throwing steeper challenges at you, you should be ready for them.

Each of the 25 amateur levels has five challenges to beat (beyond getting to the end), and they’re a great mix, addressing every aspect of the gameplay. From combo and high-score tests through to nailing specific tricks or collecting hard-to-reach items, the challenges are a great teaching tool in their own right. It wasn’t long until I was nailing perfect single-combo runs and feeling like a badass.

There’s always a steeper challenge, of course. Once you master all five challenges in an amateur level, a corresponding pro level opens up, with its own set of five. And if you can beat all 250 amateur and pro challenges, you’ll unlock another set of even harder levels. (Full disclosure – I’m nowhere even near this.)

OlliOlli 2 has a learning curve that seemingly goes forever, but its pacing is expertly judged. Even challenges that I attempted upwards of 40 or 50 times didn’t leave me (too) frustrated. The mechanics are robust enough, the controls responsive enough, and the level designs finely honed enough that I was content to simply keep at it. The restarts are instantaneous, by the way. That helps a lot.

Outside of the career mode’s 50 levels, there are another 50 spots to post a high score on – and see how you fare against your friends and the world. There’s even an ‘Ultimate Spots Score,’ tallying up your scores across all 50 spots. It’s a shame there’s no way to watch a replay of the top runs on the leaderboard in-game to see how the hell the score was earned, but I’m sure there’ll be plenty of videos floating around on YouTube before long.

It’s also a shame that the Combo Rush mode wasn’t ready for launch. This splitscreen multiplayer mode will definitely help round out OlliOlli 2’s ways to play when it’s eventually patched in.

The Olliwood premise is put to good effect.

No matter, because there’s a lot of gameplay here already, and it’s tied together by an absolutely inspired makeover. The original game’s functional pixel art has been replaced by a highly stylised, flat-shaded look that’s slick and contemporary, while also echoing points of inspiration like Another World and Prince of Persia. Each of the five locations is wonderfully distinct, taking you from the film back-lots of Olliwood through to the film sets themselves, covering Aztec ruins, the wild west, a creepy amusement park, and a futuristic cityscape. It can take a few minutes to adjust to the palettes and iconography of each new setting, but overall the visual design is a triumph. It’s far smoother in motion than the original too, and the controls are every bit as responsive as you’d expect for a timing-based game.

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Another bonus is that OlliOlli 2 is cross-buy between PS4 and Vita, and integrates cross-save to allow you to move your game between devices. It plays really well on Vita, with the brief levels and instant restarts making it a great short-burst game while out and about. It’s definitely best on PS4, however. I found it easier to time my manuals with the Dual Shock 4’s far more robust analogue stick, and the art direction and silky frame rate are at their most impressive on a big screen.