The first time I leaned out over the City map’s glass skyscraper and actually looked down, my stomach dropped like I’d missed a handhold. I hadn’t. My feet were on the carpet. That’s the whole pitch for The Climb 2 in one reflex: your brain knows you’re safe, your body is convinced you’re not, and the gap between the two is the most fun I’ve had on a Quest this year.
The Climb 2 is a VR-native game from Crytek — no flat version, no port, built for the headset from the CryEngine up. You need a Meta Quest, and that’s the only place it lives. There’s no PC VR release and no Rift version, and that’s a deliberate call, not a compromise: this is a standalone game that uses the Quest’s inside-out tracking to turn your arms into the entire control scheme. You don’t push a stick to move. You reach.
Crytek’s first The Climb launched on Rift back in 2016 before Touch controllers shipped, so it was stuck with a gamepad — a crime for a climbing game. The sequel corrects that with full motion controllers, and the difference is night and day. Each hand is a grip. You squeeze the trigger to hold a handhold, half-squeeze to loosen and save stamina, and shake to chalk up when your grip starts to fail. Every reach is you physically extending your arm into the space in front of you. After a long session my shoulders knew I’d been climbing.
The game gives you fifteen routes across five environments at launch — Alps, Bay, and Canyon return from the first game, while City and North are new. City is the standout: a Mirror’s Edge-looking sprawl of glass towers where you shimmy crane ladders, ride ziplines between rooftops, and time leaps across moving billboards. North drops you in rural Iceland with puffins and polar bears watching you sweat. Each environment has three difficulty tiers, and the harder routes layer in crumbling holds, spike grips that drain your stamina, and loose monkey bars that punish lazy planning.
Because every movement is your own hands reaching and grabbing, there’s no artificial locomotion to manage — you can play seated or standing — and the only real intensity is the height itself: looking down a skyscraper in VR is genuinely unsettling in the best way. That’s the game’s actual comfort story, and it has nothing to do with motion sickness. It’s acrophobia, not nausea, and if you’ve ever felt your legs go weak at a railing, you know exactly what I mean.
The climbing feels great. Reaching for the next hold, feeling your virtual hand close on it, and hauling yourself up is the kind of motion-control payoff that sells the format. Road to VR called the level design “spot on,” and they’re right — the routes are readable but never obvious, and the checkpoint system means a fall just restarts you at the last ledge instead of ending the run. The Ghost Race leaderboards drop a translucent pair of hands from another player into your climb, and chasing someone else’s route up a cliff is weirdly addictive. It’s one of the best climbing experiences on Quest, and the physicality is the point: this is a workout that happens to be a game.
Crytek has been generous since launch, too. Two free Freestyle expansion packs added a dozen new levels and a rhythm-climbing mode where you hit handholds to a beat, and monthly challenge events drop seasonal collectibles and wristbands. That’s a lot of game for the asking price, and the campaign alone runs a few focused hours before you start chasing leaderboard times.
It’s not flawless. The Climb 2 runs on Quest hardware, and it shows. Up close, the rock faces look great — near-photoreal in spots — but the backgrounds are lower-resolution plates, and pop-in gets ugly when you zipline or make a big leap. Reviewers called the texture work “disappointing” in places, and I won’t argue; when the spell breaks and you notice a mountain is a painted billboard, it stings.
There are also occasional bugs. A few times my head clipped into geometry and the screen went black until I shifted; a couple of long jumps read my motion wrong and bounced me off a wall to my doom. Nothing that ruined a session, but enough to remind you this is a standalone game wrestling with its hardware. And the campaign, while polished, is short and has no story to speak of — you’re here to climb, not to inhabit a world. If you want narrative depth, this isn’t it. The leaderboards are what give it legs, and if those ever went quiet, the replay value would thin out fast.
The Climb 2 is one of the stronger arguments for owning a Quest. The motion controls are the whole game and they’re excellent, the City ziplines are a genuine rush, and the presence on a ledge is something flat screens can’t touch. It’s thin on story and wears its Quest-era visuals openly, but if you’ve ever wanted to free-solo a skyscraper without the dying part, this is the one to put on.