Game EXP: The Climb 2 (OQ2/MQ2)

The Climb 2

Systems: Oculus Quest 2 / Meta Quest

Release Date: March 4, 2021

Publisher: Crytek

Developer: Crytek

While I have not completed all of the climbs in The Climb 2, which I will get to further down the line, I feel that I have completed enough of the game to throw down my thoughts about The Climb 2, a virtual reality climbing game that I played on the Oculus Quest 2 / Meta Quest.  I mentioned The Climb 2 in a very bare-bones First Impressions article where I just talked about my excitement and a video showing the second of three routes from the first of six areas, but here I wanted to talk more about the mechanics of the game, the progression, the environments, and obviously the feeling of hanging from the side of a cliff face with a multi-hundred-foot drop.

The Climb 2 is made up of five different real-world-esque locations and floating gym-style climbing walls full of separate puzzle-like routes.  Each environment has three different routes of increasing difficulty that can be completed with one of two settings.  First, there is the Casual setting that does not take into account a few of the key mechanics in the game.  This setting is all about climbing and enjoying the views, and maybe falling here or there while dynoing up to a hold.  The primary drawback with the Casual setting is that you cannot progress to the next tier route until you complete the route on the Professional setting.  The Professional setting has the same climbing routes as the Casual setting, but all of those aforementioned mechanics make the climbs more difficult, but also a lot more interesting.

All of the mechanics that the Casual setting leaves out of the Professional setting are there to give the act of climbing a bit more realism; although you are still essentially campusing and not doing anything with your feet.  First off there is a stamina bar located around your wrists.  When the stamina bar reaches zero, you can no longer hold onto the hold/grip you are holding.  When you are no longer holding a hold, you fall and start over from the last quickdraw you clipped into (brilliant use of actual climbing equipment turned in-game checkpoint).  Each hand has its own separate stamina bar and you can recharge your stamina bar when both hands are holding holds, even if your arms are spread eagle, your stamina will no longer drain.  There is also the act of chalking up your hands which adds a bonus stamina bar to your hand you just chalked, and like actually climbing, as you grip more holds, the chalk wears off and you will have to rechalk to get that bonus stamina bar back.  One way around having to constantly chalk up is to not fully depress the grips on the Oculus controller, which should not be difficult to do, but when your brain tells you that you need to grip the hell out of this particular crimp because otherwise, you are going to plummet to your death and die, then your hands proceed to grip the hell out of the controller.  The purpose of only partially gripping a hold is that you do not use any of your stamina, which makes one arm dynoing to another single crumbling hold easier when you have to immediately dyno to three more so that you can safely cross the gap.

The way I approached The Climb 2 for the first two environments was that I would do each route on the Casual setting to get a feel for the general difficulty and so that I would not be in awe of the setting my first time around.  After completing the three routes for that climb, I would attempt it again but on Professional.  I did this for the Alps and the Bay, but for the Canyon, I decided that I would start off on Professional, feeling that I was becoming proficient enough in my virtual climbing skills that I could progress through somewhat smoothly, not be in too much awe to complete the climb and be able to puzzle my way out of zags that the game would occasionally throw at me.  The Canyon stages threw quite the curveball by introducing rattlesnakes as an obstacle.  Up until the Canyon stages, there had been dynamic animals during the stages, but these were limited to ground-gopher-like creatures and insects, but rattlesnakes were a new one.  During my first run through all three of the Canyon stages, I was able to avoid the snakes, quickly climbing past them or just dynoing when I felt safe to do so.  On my later return to the first Canyon stage, I did not move when near the snake and I pulled my hand back as it struck out, causing me to fall.  I also found out that when the snakes do bite you, you automatically release whatever hold you are holding on to.  I do wish that there were more dynamic interactions like that, maybe having to climb up as waters rise in a cave system you are in, or maybe pigeons peck at your fingers when you are near nests while climbing in the City routes?

The last two stages were the City, which has some of the more vertigo-inducing sections, and the North, which is similar to the Alps, but more of a climbing on the cliffs of the fjord and less majestic mountains.  Half of the climbing in the City stages involves using the sides of buildings and structures like scaffolding to assist in your climb while the other half has you gripping structures closer resembling that of a fancy-ass climbing gym with designated holds.  What makes the City routes a little fear-inducing is that I know what being in a city is like, while I hikes I have done in mountains and caynon-like areas have been nothing like the environments here.  I have looked out from windows from the top of very tall buildings and intrusively thought about falling.  So when you find yourself clinging to a structure being held above a city by a construction crane and you need to dyno TO the crane while there is a few hundred feet drop under you, more than once I thought that I would need to just stop and turn the game off.  Fear is a weird thing.

One evening while Conklederp was playing, she decided to sit on the ground, and slowly inch herself off of the starting platform that you start each leg of your climb on.  This starting ledge is designed to help give you a sense of height and scale and a feeling of safety because you are climbing when you see the finishing/starting platform, you know that you can take a rest and that there is no risk of falling.  So this particular evening, Conklederp wanted to find out if you could fall from one of these platforms, but she did not want to simply take a step from the platform off, or in the real world, take a two-foot step behind her.  So she scooted off of the platform and found that she had just hovered there.  No falling.  I will not even try this, partly because I do not want to break the immersion, but also because this is not Richie's Plank Experience and I have already fallen countless times (enough to earn the hospital wristband).

Speaking of wristbands, there are unlockables in the game as you naturally progress through each location.  Upon completing the Professional climbs in each environment, you earn cosmetic upgrades for your gloves, watch (telling you how much time you have spent on each climb), and a wristband.  Some sets of cosmetics you can unlock by completing Professional climbs 30 times in each location or performing dynos a certain number of times, or by completing certain routes without chalk.  I have tried the no-chalk climbs a couple of times, but the additional criteria is that you cannot fall either.  I have only been able to complete this on Boar's Tusk, the first climb in the Alps and I know that if I could perfect the partial grip, I could do it, because why do you need to worry about your stamina bar if you do not need to fully grip the holds?  There are also twelve different wristbands that you can only unlock during specific times each month as they are all seasonally themed.  For instance, in February, there are floating hearts that you collect on each route, and after you collect something like 300 of them, you unlock a special Valentine's themed wristband.  The problem I have with these events is that they do not run the entire month, but usually only up until the holiday that month.  So the Valentine's event ran until February 14th, and the St. Patrick's Day event lasted until Marc 17th.  The other issue I had was that, for whatever reason, I was unable to connect to The Climb 2's servers even though my internet connection worked on other games (Ragnarock, Beat Saber), and in March, I ended up only being able to connect on March 15th after being told for two weeks that I could not connect to The Climb 2 servers to start the March event.  Put a little sour taste in my mouth.

The final environment in the game is the one that is giving me the most trouble, the Freestyle setting.  This is the one that had fancy-gym-like holds on sections of the wall that are hovering in infinite space.  Some of these routes would not be so difficult, except in these climbs, there are no quick release/checkpoints so any time you fall, you have to start over from the beginning.  I have also found that there is a lot more dynoing required in these stages and you come across the breakaway holds (holds that crumble and holding onto them within a second or two) and spikey holds (holds that drain your stamina faster and prevent you from regaining stamina if you are holding them) a lot more frequently than you do in the natural environments.  I have made it through five of them, but I remain stuck on "Moving Walls" which has walls that move out of reach after a certain amount of time and a lot of crumbling holds, and a pretty confusing route that I still have not figured out.

The last thing I wanted to mention is a feature that I feel kind of ruins the immersion of The Climb 2, and those are the online leaderboards (when they are working).  From the leaderboards, you can see your personal time and score and those of other players immediately in front and behind you, but you can also see people who have the fastest climbs for that particular route.  When you select one of these times on the leaderboard you are deciding that you are going to race them to the top of each route.  When you race someone, you can see ghostly-blue hands that represent the person you are racing and when I first tried to race someone in the top 10, I was taken aback by how fast the ghost moved.  They were fast.  Like, blindingly stupid fast.  I already knew that I was not going to win, but I decided to try to dyno like my opponent and upon reaching the end of the first route in fewer than two minutes, a whole seven minutes faster than my previous time, I had a bad feeling about this feature in the game.  While I can understand the appeal of online leaderboards and racing ghosts of other players, I found that it took away the sense of wonder and fear, two of the primary reasons why I love playing The Climb 2.  When racing, I was only focused on where I could dyno to and where I could dyno next after that.  My focus was narrowed that it was not so much that was flinging myself a dozen feet to my left, bypassing a dozen holds while being three hundred feet in the air, I was now standing in my living room racing a pair of noncorporeal hands by pulling a set passed me as fast as possible.  I have tried the race option since that first race, but only so that I could get videos to pull screenshots from.  Also I have found that the online leaderboards are down about 75% (subjective guess) of the time, so it does not really matter.  

That being said, since I first started playing, I have found that I am moving faster through the routes.  Climbs that once took me upwards of 19 minutes to complete are now taking me fewer than seven minutes, and it is hard not to mime-out the yahooing of your character when they reach the end of the climb, safely looking out on the area you just spent the last few minutes scaling.  Part of that is just familiarity with the game and its mechanics, the routes themselves, being used to the environments, and not taking as many glances around as I traverse above a waterfall while hanging onto a knotted rope 50 feet above the ground.  Part of it is being more comfortable in the Oculus, while the other part is knowing that I could skip this one section if I launch myself off of this rockface onto the ladder that is about 10 feet to my right and about 30 feet below me; that will probably shave a good minute off of my time.  But it is never about time and more about exploring and discovering new ways to finish a climb.

I do love this game.  I love the virtual feeling of virtually climbing because I love climbing in real life.  I love the different environments with the Alps, Canyon, and North being my favorite locations.  The Bay is nice, but it is a tropical setting and I would personally rather be in the mountains or above a forest than in the middle of the Pacific.  The City setting has too many stressful sections and if I just want to get in a route or two, I have found that the City is just not where I want to climb, but it is a great location to show people, plus I know there are paths on each of the routes that I haven't discovered yet, not so much to shorten the time it takes to do a route but to discover new experiences and vistas.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian