Following an excellent release in February and a good follow-up DLC in June, OlliOlli World is back for more. This new DLC is titled Finding the Flowzone. Set high in the skies in the search of a mystical and ethereal skating world known as Radlantis, it’s another example of smooth but challenging skating gameplay, while the fun never stops rolling on.
Conceptually and visually, Finding the Flowzone is my favourite of the two DLCs thus far. Players are quickly introduced to the ‘radmospheric explorers’ in Licht, Squid and Planks. They’re designed like old time-y cartographers but, as this is OlliOlli World, these looks have their own quirky spin. Looking out of the early 1900s, Planks is dressed in a warm white sweater, light green pants and specs, only with dyed hair and a skateboard made out of an old scroll. Licht wears an old Safari hat but is in a pastel-coloured pink suit. Squid looks like an old whaler, in overalls, wellies and all… but has a hat fashioned out of a shark head. Yet another welcome crew for Olli Olli World’s zany universe.
Similar to VOID Riders prior, your journey in this expansion takes you into the skies, only still in this stratosphere. You’ve traded up hanging out with aliens and are amongst the clouds where you’ll be above some of the familiar worlds from the base game. Colours and scenic views are as lush as ever as you travel across islets and gapping jets that fly by. In the lighter-coloured levels, the clouds you’re skating in and out of look pink like cotton candy. In the Nimbus polluted zone, clouds are green and storms are rolling in, adding to the atmos. Topping it all off is the picturesque Radlantis, the area you’ve been working towards. Once you arrive here you have a few missions set in what might as well be heaven. Rainbows will rear their head from behind clouds, passersby will be relaxing by picturesque pools… it’s some of the best sights in OlliOlli World yet.
Across 17 levels, you’re working towards this discovery of Radlantis and inevitably, the final skating competition that comes with it. Along the way, you’ll have map fragments to collect, a pre-requisite to proceed. You have your typical score challenges and feats to complete once more. The crux and ‘new’ gameplay gimmick with this expansion is that periodically you’ll run into gusts of winds that’ll reverse your direction.
It’s a fun and hectic means of navigation. Leaping off a platform, thinking I’m heading one way, only for a quick wind to push me back another way. This adds to the speed and challenge greatly. Already I’m moving at breakneck speeds and keeping an eye out for rails to grind off or walls to ride along. Suddenly, I have to be prepared for the moment that at any moment everything I know could be mixed up entirely.
Although this gameplay mechanic does fit in well with the chaotic and fast-paced world, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been here before. Coming off the back of the VOID Riders expansion which too played with gravity, I suppose I was hoping for something that would reinvent the wheel in how I played the game. At the very least the prior expansion’s gravity wells meant more air time, letting me slow down and recalibrate mid-run. Finding the Flowzone does have the welcome opposite to that, adding more and more speed and thinking on the fly. If all else, I got to spend more hours in OlliOlli World, the very best skating game to release in a while. I even got some sweet new cosmetics to deck my skater in.
Finding the Flowzone, Olli Olli World’s second expansion is available on November 2nd. If you’re anything like me and have adored the game thus far, it’s well worth checking out.
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
