System: Oculus Rift, Rift S
Price at Time Of Review: £22.99
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Action
Input: Gamepad, Oculus Touch
Best Playing Position: Standing, Room-Scale
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Scale huge heights and feel the exhilaration of extreme free solo climbing. Explore and enjoy the view or compete for the fastest times on leaderboards with Touch or gamepad controls. Developed by Crytek and achieved with CRYENGINE.
Review: The Climb is probably the world’s first rock climbing game. Made especially for VR this short-lived game challenges you to climb some of the world’s toughest climbs, most of which is located in exotic locations. As a rule, your hands will go wherever you look and you have to grip each hold in turn. But the problem is you use stamina while you are holding a grip and you will need to let go and chalk your hands up to stop yourself from slipping off. While a simple idea this quickly leads to horrible situations where you need to chalk up, but can’t really let go!
While there are save points and easy and hard courses they all tend to get a little tricky towards the top. There is also timed runs and easy and hard routes.But what will get you immersed deeply is not so much the sights, not so much the amazing gameplay, but it is your characters breathing and racing heartbeat sounds. Having been rock climbing myself I can tell you that this is a pretty good experience and very close to the real thing.
The climb is what some might well say the first truly made for VR game. This game simply wouldn’t have worked as a normal game, but in VR it’s exciting, exhilarating and most of all deeply, deeply immersive. OK, so for the price the gameplay hours is pathetic, but if you got this game for half that price in a sale you would be whooping for joy. These are the games that sell VR systems and while it would have bene much better with a hand controller it still feels amazing and despite best being played sat in a chair (you can stand, but your legs will give out and you will find balance an issue) you will still feel as if you are going to die when you slip of a hand grip. This is the stuff of VR dreams and Crytek have done very well indeed.
