Dying Light 2 has the best climbing since Breath of the Wild

I’ve been climbing a lot in recent video games, from Horizon forbidden west to the Unexplored: Legacy of Thieves collection, and while both have stronger characters and far more stunning views to enjoy from the mountaintops, I can’t stop thinking about the best climbing experience I’ve had in a game so far this year. I’m talking about dying light 2 stay human.

I love climbing in games. I love to run and jump and grab a ledge and swing up onto a roof. It almost never feels like real climbing – but that’s not the point; I don’t want to delve into the mundane of finding the perfect handle. I’d rather feel like an unstoppable parkour god, dashing over rickety roofs and climbing up water pipes to reach crumbling alcoves and derelict balconies. dying light 2 doesn’t force me to step back and analyze each surface, examine architecture or terrain for a developer-determined set of mandatory protrusions. in the dying light 2

, if it looks like you can grab it, most likely you can, with few exceptions. It’s incredible.

dying light 2Climbing controls are also blessedly simple. It’s just one button – the right bumper on your controller – and it doubles as a button to jump and grab a grab. The flow of jumping, climbing, and launching yourself to the next grab handle before pulling yourself up onto the next roof is all so fluid and satisfying. There’s a stamina bar that will keep you from climbing forever, but eventually you’ll unlock power-ups to extend it. You’ll collect more traversal tools (like a grappling hook) later in the game, but the basic mechanics impressed me from the start. The simple act of pressing a button to traverse everything in my path, all while keeping an eye on my stamina meter as I randomly leveled up, gave me an instant sense of agency and freedom – even when traversing a tough zombie-infested World.

Image: Guerrilla Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

By contrast, climbing in Uncharted and Horizon games feels bizarrely restrictive, despite the invitation to endless, joyful exploration implied by those games’ beautiful locations. in the Horizon forbidden west, Aloy can only climb certain grab rails and use her Focus (her universal, futuristic Google Glass attachment) to scan and highlight safe ledges. Many puzzles have only one route available. Luckily for Aloy, there’s always a grab bar, ladder, or rope in just the right place to get her to the next platform. Given that Aloy typically explores crumbling ruins abandoned by civilization, it’s downright bizarre that she always manages to find a perfect path, seemingly created by a climbing gym designer. She jumps from a convenient ladder to just a wooden ledge that happens to be within range, and so on. Although the world may appear realistic, their artistry is evident in the design of these climbing puzzles; For Aloy there is almost always only one way.

Then there’s Aloy’s grappling hook, which is so restrictive it’s ridiculous. It has two different uses, each with a completely different key combination; One allows her to grab onto and remove debris to gain access to new areas, and the other allows her to pull herself to very specific grapple points and swing upwards. It’s complexity for the sake of complexity, and in practice it actually feels more restrictive than a clever incorporation of a new iterating tool. in the dying light 2

, similar to Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, you can use the grappling hook to swing from building to building without having to worry as much about specific grappling points. It’s simple and slick, and really feels like a power-up when you get it, unlike Aloy’s grappling hook, which is more of an occasional annoyance (“Which button was it again?”).

Since Todd Howard allegedly said, “Do you see this mountain? You can climb it.” I wanted to play a game that delivered on that promise. The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim naturally does its best by letting the player wander around, jumping over various rock textures and balancing on rugged terrain. breath of the wild enhanced the same sense of endless exploration but with a stamina bar that makes the experience of climbing all the more satisfying by introducing an overcomeable but slightly stressful sense of limitation. But it is Dying Light 2 Stay Human This does the job best as it allows the player to scale almost any structure while narrowing down the entire experience to the touch of a button. This is as good as it gets. Well, at least until Breath of the Wild 2.