When I was sure I could grab an anchor, but it would inexplicably not work, I would pull down the trigger and swivel my head around until I grabbed on. The distance my grip could be apart while climbing felt inconsistent. About half the time I struggled to get my hands on each hold, never quite certain what I could reach. The mechanics of climbing are also spotty. I don’t feel like a person – I feel like a pair of disconnected fingers, and the unnatural effect is magnified since they are the only part of you casting a shadow. The disembodied hands are functional, but seeing two floating body parts hurt my ability to insert myself into the game. Several obstacles impede the experience, despite the impressive visuals and interesting climbing mechanic. Your floating hands are climbing the mountain only because it’s there you have no emotional narrative driving them up the cliffside, but improving your speed and being a better climber raises your score, opens up the new difficulties, and unlocks cosmetic items like new gloves, wristbands, and watches.
A short climb lasts about 15 minutes, but some of the later difficulties took me up to 45 minutes for a single climb, leading to a fairly full experience. Three mountains are available for climbing, with each having three unlockable difficulties that change the experience dramatically. You can chalk for a better grip, move your head and crane your neck around corners to find the next or better anchor, and jump to faraway grabs – if you have the fortitude.
If you hang on with one hold for too long, you fall. Your head movement directs a pair of disembodied hands, and pulling the triggers on the controller closes the corresponding fist to clasp onto handholds. The Climb is a realistic take on climbing mountains that allows you to finally live out your fantasies of scaling a cliff face without sore arms.
Its movement away from violence and explosions in favor of serene mountain climbing for this new platform is an admirable step, but frequent frustrations and a heavy reliance on head movement lead to an often tiresome (but still beautiful) experience. Questions of overall quality aside, games like Crysis and Ryse: Son of Rome are visual powerhouses, which makes the studio’s foray into the world of virtual reality one worth paying attention to. While the game only features four locations (three real-world based locales and one Matrix-esque training ground), there are plenty of paths to navigate and extras to unlock, keeping virtual climbers coming back for many return trips.Crytek is known for its impressive visuals. Between the impressive graphics and the fluid motions of the Touch controllers, it's far too easy to forget that your feet are still, thankfully, planted on good ol' terra firma. It's the little things as well, like the glistening sweat on your palms, the sound of your beating heart, or even the bugs crawling in front of your face while an eagle soars past. It's not just the sense of height that's overwhelming. The level of detail in The Climb is simply amazing. The game faithfully recreates the rush, the excitement, and yes, the anxiety, of dangling precariously hundreds of feet in the air with the only things between you and certain doom being a firm chalky grip and Newton's Law of Gravity.
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