Don’t look down, because Crytek’s aptly-named climbing game The Climb (2017) is headed out of Rift exclusivity soon with its impending launch on Oculus Quest.
Update (December 4th, 2019): The Climb is now available Oculus Quest, which includes cross-buy support, meaning if you already bought it on Rift, you now have it for free on Quest.
Check out the trailer below, which is a better version than the one previously reported by UploadVR:
https://youtu.be/CEWJJzH229k
Original Article (November 18th, 2019): Crytek tweeted last week that Quest owners should expect the game “soon,” although hasn’t mentioned a more precise launch window at this time.
As one of the most visually refined VR games to date, it wasn’t certain how the Quest version would live up to the original when it was first announced for the standalone VR headset back at Oculus Connect 5 in 2018; it looks like we have our answer now though.
A trailer, obtained by UploadVR, shows a noticeable hit in visual quality over the Rift version, as it shows both a visibly lower polygon count and lower-resolution textures—putting it somewhere in the neighborhood of the Quest version of Robo Recall (2017).
In the video’s description UploadVR maintains the trailer was encoded with a low bitrate, which causes some unsightly blockiness in the video capture (see update).
Graphics notwithstanding, The Climb for Quest looks to retain all of the game mechanics (and climbing locations) of the original. In our review on Rift, we gave it a middling score of [3/5], which was mainly due to overall comfort and the glaring issue that, at launch, The Climb was only playable with the Xbox One controller. Obviously the game has since been updated to support Touch, but the lack of Touch support definitely knocked it down a peg when it went live on the Oculus Store in 2017.
Crytek has also issued updates since its inclusion of Touch support, including an expansion called ‘The North’ that features an icy playground inspired by the Arctic Circle. In case you haven’t played the Rift version before, here’s a quick peek for comparison’s sake: