Given the fact that The Climb 2 is a game that prides itself on its vistas, it’s a bit weird to not even have the option of playing it on a PC-powered headset to really push as much detail to as many pixels as possible. Hopefully it gets ported to PC eventually like Myst VR.
Despite the fact that the visuals are clearly held back by the mobile processing power of the Oculus Quest, The Climb 2 still manages to look absolutely breathtaking at times. When you’re in the thick of things, clinging on for dear life, desperately scanning the side of a cliff trying to find the next handhold, you don’t tend to notice the muddy up close textures, but they’re still there. Or when you’re standing at the top of a mountain and looking out at the gorgeous landscape you don’t usually notice that the water isn’t moving or that the natural landmarks are a tad blurry, even though they are.
The original announcement trailer for The Climb 2 included a footnote that footage shown was captured on a PC and yet the game isn’t available for PC VR headsets. That’s a bit misleading in my opinion because, even though The Climb 2 does look nice, it doesn’t look anywhere near as sharp or detailed inside the headset as they made it seem in the trailer.
That being said, visually it did impress me far more than the original’s Quest port. That felt like a massive downgrade compared to its PC counterpart, so releasing this one on Quest first is probably a smart call so if it does get a PC port that will be viewed as an upgrade, rather than the reverse.
When compared to other Quest games though, and especially when played on a Quest 2, there’s no doubt that it’s one of the best looking games on the platform by far. Especially in the more rocky and mountainous courses, where the art style really excels best. I wasn’t a fan of the visual style in the city environment, all of the buildings looked like they were made of plastic rather than actually feeling realistic.
They’ve done a great job of expanding on the controls in the previous game and luckily if you never played the first one, it doesn’t take long to run through the tutorial and get up to speed. You simply reach out and grab ledges, ropes, ladders, and so on using the trigger and keep an eye on your stamina rings on each wrist. The harder your squeeze a ledge with one hand the more stamina depletes, while grabbing with both hands recovers both, or you can hang with one hand to recover the free hand. You can press the grip button and shake your hand to re-apply chalk as well.
However, things get interesting once you master the art of half-gripping and jumping, or what I like to call ‘throwing yourself’ across levels. For a half-grip you simply only press down the trigger partially and it won’t decrease your maximum stamina, which means you can can go longer without re-applying chalk, but it’s tricky to get the pressure of your squeeze just right.
Then if you can combine this with a jump/throw, you can clear large gaps and huge distances without even losing much stamina at all. Most courses can take upwards of 10 minutes to clear on your first try, but there were special rewards for doing some of them in under four, for example. You’ve got to throw and leap all over the place to make that kind of blistering pace happen.
There’s a lot of new nuances here as well with the ropes, zip lines, sharp rocks, breakable rocks, and more. Plus, even if the city levels didn’t look as good up close as the mountain regions, the diversity of levels here is fantastic. There are five total regions (such as Alps, City, Canyon, etc) and each region has three climbs with two difficulty modes each.
If you choose the ‘Easy’ mode then your time and score won’t be tracked on the global leaderboard since chalk and stamina aren’t required, but it’s a good way to learn the layouts. On ‘Professional’ difficulty you’ll have to keep track of stamina and keep your hands nice and chalky.
The difference in difficulty between ‘Easy’ and ‘Professional’ is pretty drastic, especially on some of the harder courses. Regardless of the one you pick you can always tap a button for arrows to pop up and provide guidance for which way to go and you get one free ‘rewind’ ability to reset back at the previous checkpoint without losing any time.
The difference is in stamina management. Since you don’t need to worry about chalk on ‘Easy’ it just totally changes the dynamic of the whole game, but like I said before, it’s still handy for learning layouts.
The Climb 2 is a convincing experience, if for no reason other than how good it looks. I played with a fan pointed at my body most of the time to simulate a nice cool breeze and that really helped a lot too. After just two or three climbs, each of which usually take 10-15 minutes depending on familiarity, my arms were already getting sore.
The Climb 2 Review – Comfort Settings
The Climb 2 doesn’t really have any comfort options since the entire experience of simulating climbing necessitates all of the design decisions the developers made. If you have a fear of heights or get squeamish from artificial camera movements, this might not be the best game for you. That being said, physicality has been known to alleviate those feelings in some cases, which means the reaching, arm-swinging, and jumping you do while playing this in real life might sidestep VR sickness for you.
