Your arm muscles may not tire, but your fingers slowly cramp from constant gamepad clutching. Instead of trying to outright imitate real climbing, The Climb creates a stylized, smaller-scale version of its adrenalin rush, learning process, and eventual hard-earned victory. He (at least based on the masculine voice and hands) can climb for miles without rest, casually apply chalk with one hand barely resting on a tiny ledge, and stretch his arms across gaps I probably couldn’t jump. The invisible body that connects your hands is an impossible creature of preternatural flexibility and upper body strength, a Wacky WallWalker with a love of extreme sports. The charm of The Climb, meanwhile, is that it’s less about literally putting players in the game than allowing them to steer the inhuman form of some genetically engineered super-climber. Motion controllers drive home the limitations of players’ strength and endurance, particularly when you’re doing something as active as swinging and stretching your arms above your head. Is this, like so many other Oculus features, just an awkward stopgap until true motion controls arrive? I’m not sure. It’s probably possible to play The Climb sitting down, but it’s an active enough game that I found it much easier to stand. Centering your hand on grips is much harder than it sounds, often requiring leaning, crouching, and occasionally real physical jumping. Crytek has created some kind of genetically engineered super-climberīut the truly bizarre thing is that you actually are combining all these actions with motion tracking - just not the kind that involves realistically mirroring movement. To grab particularly distant ledges, you’ll need to press a button to jump, throwing yourself off one side of a cliff and hoping to get a good grip on the other.
You can buy more time by stopping periodically to rub your hands with chalk - using another controller button - or by carefully half-releasing a trigger, gaining stamina but risking a fall. The key mechanic is a fatigue system that kicks in whenever you’re hanging from one hand, giving you a few seconds to anchor the other one and recover.
Instead of reaching out a physical arm, you’ll look at a ledge or crevice to center one virtual hand over it, then hit the corresponding trigger to pull yourself up. For now, though, players control two disembodied hands with a blend of Xbox gamepad and Rift head tracking.
The climb vr status 91 simulator#
It’s not photorealistic, but mostly because everything looks too vivid to be real: an idyllic tropical bay, a rugged red-cliff canyon, a lush alpine slope.Ī VR rock climbing simulator is the sort of thing that seems to demand motion controllers, and when Oculus releases its Touch devices later this year, The Climb will support them. Given the opportunity to work with only one of those things, the studio has poured all its resources into incredible vistas and carefully molded cliffs, their surfaces pocked with climbing handholds marked by a subtly weathered texture. (At $49, it’s also the rare title that’s priced like one.) Crytek is best known for combining lavish visuals with relentless bloodshed, in games like Crysis and Ryse: Son of Rome.
The Climb, released only on the Oculus Rift, is still a rare creation: a virtual reality title that looks like a big-budget first-person game.