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

I’ve done a lot of climbing in recent video games, from Horizon Forbidden WestTo the Uncharted: The Legacy of Thieves collection, and although both of those have stronger characters and significantly more stunning vistas 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 light2 Stay Human.

Climbing is something I enjoy doing. It’s my favorite thing to do is run, jump, grab a ladder and then swing up onto the roof. It almost never feels like real-life rock-climbing — but that’s not the point; I don’t want to deal with the mundanities of finding the perfect hand-hold. My ideal feeling is to be unstoppable in parkour. I like to glide across the roofs, scramble up water pipes and reach crumbling balconies. Dying light 2 doesn’t force me to step back and analyze each surface, scoping out architecture or terrain for a developer-determined set of prescriptive ledges. You can find out more. Dying Light 2You can almost always grab anything that looks possible. It’s incredible.

Dying Light 2’s climbing controls are blessedly simple, too. It’s just one button – the right bumper on your controller – and it doubles as the button for both jumping and grabbing a handhold. It’s so easy to feel the flow between climbing and leaping before you reach the next handhold. There’s a stamina bar that stops you from climbing forever, but eventually, you’ll unlock power-ups to extend it. Later in the game, you’ll collect even more traversal tools (like a grappling hook), but the foundational mechanics already impressed me from the very start. The simple act of pressing one button to traverse anything in my path, needing only to keep an eye on my stamina bar if I happened to be ascending, gave me an immediate sense of agency and freedom – even as I was traversing a harsh, zombie-infested world.

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By contrast, the climbing in Uncharted and Horizon games feels bizarrely limiting, despite the invitation of endless, joyful exploration implied by these games’ gorgeous locales. In Horizon Forbidden WestAloy is unable to climb on certain handholds. Aloy uses her Focus, her futuristic, in-universe Google Glass attachment, to find and highlight safe ledges. There is one way to solve many puzzles. Aloy has the advantage of finding a handhold, ladder or rope at just the right place to take her to the next platform. Given that Aloy is usually exploring dilapidated ruins abandoned by civilization, it’s downright bizarre that she always manages to find a perfect path that appears to have been laid out by a rock climbing gym designer. She’ll leap from one convenient ladder to just one wooden ledge that happens to be within reach, and so on. Aloy will only ever choose one way to go, despite the illusions of the real world.

Then there’s Aloy’s grappling hook, which is so limiting that it’s laughable. There are two possible uses for it. One allows her grab on debris to be removed in order to reach new areas. The other lets her pull herself toward specific grapple points to swing upwards. It’s complexity for the sake of complexity, and in practice, it actually feels more restrictive, rather than a clever incorporation of a new tool for traversal. You can find it here. Dying Light 2, much like 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 grapple points. It’s simple and smooth, and it truly feels like a power-up when you receive it, as opposed to Aloy’s grappling hook, which is more of an occasional nuisance (“Which button was it again?”).

Ever since Todd Howard supposedly said, “See that mountain? You can climb it,” I’ve wanted to play a game that fulfilled that promise. The Elder ScrollsSkyrimIt does its best by giving the opportunity to simulate hiking, allowing players to jump over different rock textures while balancing on pieces and pieces of jagged terrain. Take a deep breath of the wildImprovements were made to that feeling of endless exploration. However, the stamina bars introduced a slight stress level, which makes climbing even more rewarding. Yet it’s Keep Humanity Alive by Dying LightIt does the best job, as it allows players to climb almost all structures and reduces their experience to just one button. It’s as simple as that. It will be at least for a while. Breath of the Wild 2..