Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good ol’ days when game maps would reveal themselves bit by bit as you explored. Minecraft still does it, and I’m grateful for that. It’s really satisfying seeing your map update, pixel by pixel, as you venture further and further into the unknown. Assassin’s Creed featured a different way to defog your surroundings: climbing up a large tower and absorbing the sights of a city from above. In a game all about climbing, this was a great feature, and it became a staple of the franchise. While it was fun for a couple of games, its novelty quickly grew stale and repetitive.
Despite this, Ubisoft loved the mechanic so much that it was added to Far Cry, a first-person shooter franchise that has very little to do with climbing if I’m being honest. The tower plague was spreading, yet it seemed confined to Ubisoft. Unfortunately, someone noticed that the publisher’s games were selling rather well and decided it was because of all those dastardly towers, so now loads of triple-A titles have them. The cat’s out of the bag, and it doesn’t seem to want to go back in. For what it’s worth, the creator of Assassin’s Creed is sorry.
I hate them. Climbing ‘Ubisoft Towers’ is a tedious exercise that turns exploration into a checklist activity. Instead of being able to enjoy a journey, I find myself scouring the map for the telltale markings of towers so that I can scale them all before I start actually enjoying the game. It may be weird, but I just can’t stand to see a blank map while I’m doing a mission. I have to unlock the whole thing to ensure it doesn’t distract me.
The only game that’s been able to buck the tedium and make ‘Ubisoft Towers’ fun is Horizon Zero Dawn. But what makes the towers in Horizon better than the ones in say, Breath of the Wild? They’re colossal, walking robot dinosaurs - that’s why. You don’t just climb some shaky tower, you have to run and jump onto the mechanical spine of a Tallneck, so named because of its absurdly long neck. This is a world where robot crocodiles are called Snapmaws, so I don’t know why you expected anything different.
The Tallnecks move around a set route, and you have to find a good point in the landscape to launch yourself from to get a hold of them. They have radar dishes on their heads that collect regional data, which is why we need to scale them in the first place. Not as good as the fantastic jargon in Mass Effect, but it’ll do. Once you hack the data out of them, an electrical burst stuns them long enough for you to rappel down and run off before you get trampled.
While Zero Dawn offers an exceptionally fun take on the mechanic, I hope Forbidden West does away with it entirely because, at its core, it’s not a fun thing to do over and over again. There are many expectations Forbidden West needs to meet. It needs to avoid turning Aloy into Lara Croft, offer a better portrayal of motherhood, and fix some niggling issues present in Zero Dawn.
I’m hopeful, since everything we’ve seen thus far looks great. I love the improvements made to melee combat and the underwater sections look astonishing. The grappling hook will enable proper utilisation of the verticality present in the game as well, something Zero Dawn would have benefited greatly from. And look, I get that there needs to be a way to unlock the map. I’m fine with having to hack something, just make it ground level, please?
