The Climb 2 Pcvr

[Queila Neubecker]

Whenany climb starts, you find yourself on a small, wooden platform. There are three more of those, marking your progress up the climb and indicated with large flags; A, B, and, your final destination, your top-of-the-world-ma moment, C.

My favorite by far was the City area, which offered a bunch of unique gadgets and one-off climbing experiences. Shimmying from exposed brick to a crane ladder, and then to a zipline through the building tops is simply a thrilling experience.

I wonder how many (if any) out there are like me and preferred The Climb with the xbox controller over the touch controllers. My issue is that moving your hands while holding on made it seem like the mountain was moving and it was completely immersion breaking and weird. You could be holding on then moving your arms all around and the mountain would be doing that. Jumping was also really weird and glitchy with the touch controllers.

You will be greeted at the start of the game by a well-paced and detailed tutorial, that will teach you all the basics of climbing, and more tutorials being introduced as you move to harder climbs with new obstacles and mechanics in place. But, what these tutorials do is make sure you are ready for The Climb.

When climbing the ledges you can grab hold of are highlighted with a white chalked edge, this will indicate in what directions you can go, be it side-ways, upwards or sometimes dropping to another ledge. It all depends on which way you want to challenge the mountain in front of you and what is in your reach. Outside of your standard reach, you will also have the option to either jump upwards and sideways to reach ledges or make it over gaps in your routes. The jumping is handled it two ways, you can go for the more realistic pulling to use your momentum or simply by pressing the A button facing the direction you want to jump.

As previously mentioned, as you progress through the stages some more mechanics can come into play, to try to offer more of a challenge in your climbs. These come in the form ledges you need to dust off, crumbling ledges and also ledges with poisonous plant-life on them. In some cases you could miss these with a jump, but not in all cases.

The Climb looked absolutely fantastic and beautiful in the Rift version of the game, and we were worried this is was where the game would falter in this stand-alone device. But the Quest version managed to still look great, despite the visual downgrades it had to make, and where previously it seemed those hyper-realistic looks are hard to pass on the Quest, The Climb manages to do this well. But, the team at Crytek deserve a massive pat on the back for keeping the game looking great within the restraints of the Quest hardware.

But, as with the climbing mechanic a big part of the game and its immersion was going to building the atmosphere and environments with the use of the sounds. Again this has been done to high-level with the sound of the wind moving around you as you scale higher and higher, and your characters breathing indicating your stamina being all that they needed and these are spot on. Add to this the great use of the spacial audio making moments like when a helicopter flies-by take you in, as you turn and see it in the position the sound has indicated.

Again though with the Quest restrictions you will find some parts where the audio faces some issues. With the main one we noticed being the sound of running rapids below you, yet when you looked down there was no animation to the water. However as mentioned this is more down to the restrictions of running it from a mobile processor, so it was really taken out of the hands of the team at Crytek.

For the immersion you really need to play the game standing, and we would recommend this is the only way you should play it. When it comes to the comfort of moving, as you are not walking it will be comfortable for most users. However, at first those falls when running out of stamina could make you feel off-balance and uneasy on your feet. Even as someone who has stopped suffering from these, for some reason The Climb managed to make me feel it.

Then outside of these single player reasons to return, you can also challenge friends and other players on the leader-boards by setting fastest times for each climb. So, if this is your thing you will have a great reason to keep returning to the game.

The Climb is another title on the Quest, that pushes the boundaries of the hardware while showing exactly what it is capable of achieving. The Quest version of the game brings with it all the solid and fluid mechanics from the Rift version of the game, and still looks and sounds great despite the downgrades they needed to make. With many reasons for you return to the game after completing all the climbs, giving it plenty of replay value. With the experience of the game only being let down by a few decisions breaking the immersion in some cases.

So after my initial review went live, the developers got in touch with me and said that a future update to Sky Climb would introduce some new accessibility options that address the control & tracking problems I talked about in my review.

Well, I played the game after the update and I am very pleased to say that the new accessibility options improve the whole experience by a lot. Instead of waving, spreading or swinging your arms wildly to glide, fall and toss yourself around, you can now do all that using the analog sticks.

The game plays and feels way better now as you have way more control where you fling or toss yourself. Don't get me wrong, the game is still very challenging, but at least now you don't feel like you are fighting against the tracking of the device. Anyway, below you can still read the original review of the game.

Sky Climb is a really interesting VR climbing platformer that ultimately falters due to the limitation of the platform itself. Let me explain. The unique aspect of Sky Climb is how you move through the level. All movement is based on grabbing onto floating boxes in the fairly large levels and flinging yourself onto the next boxes and so on until you reach the end of the level.

While this movement mechanic is cool and somewhat satisfying at first, the floaty physics along with the hit-and-miss tracking of the Quest controllers quickly turn the experience into a real slog. When you grab onto one of these boxes, you need to swing your arm and release the grab button at the correct moment to propel yourself towards the next boxes. The inside-out tracking of the Quest headset is surprisingly good, but even it has its own limitations, and after spending a couple of hours with Sky Climb, I think these developers have hit those limitations.

To propel or launch yourself correctly, you will need to swing your arms in weird and unnatural ways, and most of the time, that swinging will happen just outside of the Quest's tracking range. So, most of the time, you will either overshoot and fly really far or fail to launch altogether, ultimately falling down to your doom or floating up towards the sky. When you start playing the game, on rare occasions, you will hit that perfect swing and release, and it's really satisfying. But most of the time, you will just try and try and try again, and that gets not only tiring on your arms but also quite frustrating.

The floaty physics help mitigate that frustration at times, as you have a couple of abilities like a dash that propels you wherever you are gazing, and you can also perform a dive gesture that allows you to fall down faster. You can also glide by spreading your arms and flap your arms to fly for a little bit. All of these abilities give you a little more control, but again, at the end of the day, it still feels like you are at the mercy of the Quest's tracking limitations.

Getting through the 65 different levels in the single-player mode will take you a couple of hours. These levels are spread out across different worlds that slowly introduce new mechanics like water guns to pacify angry crocodile floaties or dolphins that you can use as rockets to move around the level, obstacles like angry suns, bouncing blocks, tornados, etc., and each world culminates with a boss fight. Even though it might not look like it given its cute, vibrant, and balloon-y graphics, Sky Climb is a really hard game, borderline punishing at times.

Apart from the single-player mode, there's also a multiplayer mode. Unfortunately, as is usual with many weird and niche Quest games, the online population is either too small or completely nonexistent. I managed to get into a couple of matches, and yeah, smacking other players out of the way and seeing them fall down into the abyss has its charm, but that still doesn't change the fact that you still have to deal with the whole hit-and-miss flinging around. You can unlock cosmetics and customize your balloon character, but I don't see the value in it when you don't really see your character. There's also a level editor where you can create your own levels, and if you're into that kind of thing, that's one more feature for you to explore.

I'm not sure how I feel about Sky Climb. On one hand, I think the idea behind the movement is cool, but on the other hand, the execution and clear limitation of the platform somewhat undermine the whole thing. I really hope the developers keep working on this game more, tighten up the floaty physics a little bit more, maybe add more magnetism towards the boxes, or even introduce a completely new way to fling yourself, maybe some sort of a slingshot mechanic that doesn't require you to swing your arms wildly. There's definitely some untapped potential in this title, and if there's a trial available, give it a shot and see if the gameplay clicks for you. Thanks for reading!

Really like this game and was happy this was on the list. I like the feel of the game and it seems to run well except using my controllers there is no button that is assigned to climbing which seems a little weird since in this game you do a lot of climbing. I have not been able to figure out if I can remap this as I just purchased this software today. I hope there is some way to fix this in the default setting please. Thanks for your consideration.

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