OlliOlli World – How to Go Fast & Jump High

Are you unsure why your character sometimes slows down or speeds up for no reason? Does it seem that some gaps require random chance to clear?

This brief guide sheds light on the basics of how speed and jump height are determined in OlliOlli World.

Speed

All credit goes to mondsemmel!

• If you want to maintain a combo throughout the run, you can only speed up via Pushing at the very start. Otherwise, you can Push whenever you’ve slowed down. The latter can be particularly useful to beat difficult challenges which don’t require a combo.
• Rolling or grinding upwards costs speed; rolling or grinding downwards increases speed.
  • In particular, grinding upwards costs more speed than jumping. So whenever you jump onto a rail that’s steeper than your current angle, you can gain net speed by jumping onto it as late as possible.
  • Similarly, when you’re already on an upward-pointing rail, if the rail isn’t too steep, then you can gain net speed by jumping up the rail instead of grinding upwards.
  • In contrast, jumping during or over a downwards-pointing slope costs a lot of speed. In particular, try to land as early as possible on downwards slopes, so you can gain as much speed as possible.
  • In summary, spend as much time on downwards slopes as possible, and as little time on upwards slopes as possible.
• Some abilities reduce speed. These at least include spinning, as well as special grinds and/or grind switches. And Firecrackers either cost speed, or at least don’t increase speed, even though they’re always at a downwards angle. In contrast, at least grabs definitely don’t reduce speed.
• In defiance of physics, quarterpipes either outright reset your speed, or at least set it to a minimal speed value. So even if you’ve been slowed down a lot in front of a quarterpipe, you can still continue the run without crashing as long as you don’t entirely stall out in front of the quarterpipe.

Jumps

• For jump height, the only thing that matters is the angle at which you jump, i.e. whether you’re on a ramp or an upwards-pointing rail.
  • That’s also why the highscorers in replays usually jump over the U-part of U-shaped rails, or jump on top of the tip of a ramp rather than riding up the ramp: because they still get the jump height bonus, while sacrificing less speed.
  • Conversely, whenever you want to make a shorter jump, you can either jump early, or skip ramps by jumping over them, or jump from a rail at a point when it’s less steep.
• For wall rides, you can either jump off the wall ride, or you’ll naturally drop off at the end. The former gives you more jump height and distance.
  • This becomes particularly relevant in Los Vulgas, which introduces lots of very thin wallrides. If you don’t immediately jump off such wallrides, you’ll drop off instead, thus lose a lot of height, and can ultimately often no longer make the corresponding gap.
• Finally, you can jump off of rails much later than you’d think from the animation. It’s like there’s a kind of “coyote time” where you can still jump a few hundred ms after your character has already visibly left the rail. Some particularly wide gaps in later zones can only be crossed via such late jumps.
• PS: There’s one single move in the game which affects your ability to land: when spinning, you can only land the jump into a Firecracker if your character points forwards or backwards (= 0°, 180°, 360°). If they point towards or away from the screen instead (= 90° or 270°), then any attempt to land a Firecracker instead bounces off the staircase, and likely leads to a crash.