Playing
Basic Controls
The bike controlling in Elasto Mania consists of accelerating, braking, turning and volting. You accelerate by pressing the up arrow, which causes the rear tire to spin and brake by pressing the down arrow, which locks both tires. Turning is done by pressing space, and it flips the direction your kuski faces horizontally. Volting rotates the bike: Pressing left causes the bike to rotate counterclockwise and pressing right rotates it clockwise. Volting is an important ability to control the orientation of the bike. All the controls work both while on the ground and while in the air, though mainly volting is used while flying.
Tricks
If you press both volting keys at the same time or a special key, you get an extra powerful clockwise volt called alovolt.
You don't always drive with both wheels on the ground. You can hang, which means driving upside down on a thin polygon with one or both wheels.
Thanks to the very elastic suspension, it's possible to stretch the bike a lot when you have a lot of speed and hit something that stops one or both of the wheels.
You can also bounce, not only by falling from a height, but also on purpose on almost any surface in the level as long as you have sufficient speed and right direction. (Note that the term bounce is always used to refer to a special compression and sudden release of the bike's suspension, not the bike hitting a polygon and bouncing off normally.) You can combine a bounce with brutal volt, which is simply a full 360° volt made on a flat surface. The added bounce, when done properly, gives you extra height and/or speed and may help you get over tall obstacles, as for example in the world record style in Uphill Battle.
Sometimes a passage is too low to allow you to go through it normally without banging your head. This is called a pipe. To get through a pipe you need to drive through it sideways, while repeatedly pressing the turn or volt keys to keep your head from hitting the floor or ceiling.