The trick system is fairly awkward, since there isn't much feedback on what you might be doing wrong if you miss a trick. It seems like inputting the trick directions too quickly causes the trick to fail, which is unintuitive. Instead you have to hold space and do the inputs relatively slowly. I expected to want to try to input the trick quickly, but that never works.
Once you get the tricks working, the speed boost is very satisfying, but it's easy to go too fast - the player is fairly far forward in the screen, and the render distance isn't very far, so it's easy to boost too much and smack something that's popped out in front of you.