These look sooo good it's almost sexy.Assassin's Creed, you see something, and it's climbable, a simple but major design choice that changed the way you traverse the world and paved the way for more organic exploration, with appropriately polished animation:
.... how have I never seen this game before? The spritework looks incredible!
DK Jungle climber/king of swing is VERY satisfying once you get the hang of it and do the more expert stuff
Legend and Anniversary don't even have proper wall-climbing as it's described in this thread. Underworld does and it's a pretty poor implementation. Basically just press the stick in the direction you want to go and be done with it. And LAU's traversal in general is pretty lacklustre IMO. Yeah, you can speed it up to get it over with quicker but what kind of argument is that? Tomb Raider used to be a platformer at heart. Platforming in those games should be fun and you shouldn't have to wish for a way to get it over with quickly. LAU's problem was always two-fold:It's Tomb Raider Legend/Anniversary/Underworld. Those games solved the problem of it being boring to just hold the analogue stick in one direction and wait. They have a mechanic where if you press the Interact button with the right rhythm you can turn Lara's standard climbing animation into a much faster version, which keeps you engaged the whole time you're climbing walls, poles, ropes or shimmying along ledges. It baffles me why that mechanic was never used again, not even in subsequent Tomb Raider games.
Those games even made running across long stretches of flat ground interesting, because you could press the jump and crouch buttons in different combinations to bust out impromptu gymnastic floor routines:
That's kind of what makes it bad, though (IMO). If it takes a lot of effort for the character, it should take at least some effort on your part, as well. There's just this huge disconnect between what you're doing on your controller and what you're watching on your screen which translates to a disconnect between you and the character. It doesn't feel like you're doing those things a lot of the time, it feels like the character is doing them. You're just pointing them in a general direction. Now, some people may enjoy that but I just find it very boring and at times even immersion-breaking.
Crazy Climber - still the champ. Twin-stick action, all the way to the top!
Right, I can understand that. When someone asks me what game has the 'best climbing', I personally don't look at it in terms of complexity or puzzle solving but ease of use and freedom for me as a player in an open world. It's why I didn't enjoy Breath of the Wild's climbing for example. I didn't feel like I was accomplishing anything or getting rewarded in that game, but rather frustrated. It just got in my way.
As a stealth game, if they required complex inputs for the climbing, there would be a lot of issues, the satisfaction comes from how you use it as climbing is a tool. The ease of climbing feeds back into the stealth scenarios as you're incredibly mobile compared to your enemies.
Just straight-up jog up them. Fast and easy, don't waste my time.
The thing that bums me out in Horizon is that climbing sections are incredibly rare and far between, but that also makes them really really obviously signposted when they do happen. I think it's a fantastic game, but I wish they'd peppered more climbable surfaces around the world even if they didn't all lead to rare items or whatever.
Very few games integrate climbing into the core move set of the player as well as AC imho. And that's why it works the best again imho, because it's not a separate mechanic and to a larger degree feeds into every other aspect of the game.
I almost squeezed my mouse into a splintered mess because of this game...
