It's hard to know what sort of review I should write about Kreedz Climbing. After all, it's such a niche sort of game of interest which, in a way, expects you to already know all about it before you actually play it. If you DO know what you're getting into, you hardly need to read a review, so I suppose I'm writing this for those who have no idea what KZ even is.

Truth be told, even I didn't really know until I played this. Over the course of many years of playing various source games, I would occasionally join servers which I only knew of as "surf" servers, or "jumpmaps", or "deathtrap", and the like. And though my experience with them was limited, and extremely rocky, I absolutely loved them. To date, I can't think of any traditional title that even comes close to the feeling of surfing in a Source game. The sheer amount of freedom and skill required to excel, and the feeling provided while zooming through the air, only to land gracefully and keep that momentum up, has yet been replicated for me, with more "parkour" games having a totally different style that didn't feel nearly as free-form, and lacked the charm of the average source KZ map made in some dude's basement by a 14 year old. For years, I was hoping that something like this would be released, a collection of all these various maps and gamemodes and such, and with Kreedz Climbing, my hopes came to be reality.

To explain it simply, Kreedz Climbing is a collection of an absolute ♥♥♥♥-load of various maps (plus workshop support) that all follow one of the main KZ gameplay styles, which, to those who are uninformed, are basically skill-based movement-focused maps, that rely not on killing other players, but rather, making it from one place to another, via a number of obstacles that require very specific types of movement to get passed. Most of these movements involve exploiting some quirk from the Source engine. In a sense, KZ is built upon physics flaws, if you wanna make it sound awful, though the same could be said for strafe-running and bunny-hopping. In KZ, the maps that take advantage of these flaws include surf maps, which require you to glide along the sides of prisms and leap through the air to other prisms, climb maps, which require you to navigate environments filled with conveniently (and sometimes not so conveniently) placed blocks and edges, which also required knowing of air-strafing (changing direction mid-air, which is harder than it sounds), and jump maps, which require you to bunny-hop (rapid jumping) on a series of blocks without stopping, lest you get sent back to the start.

This may sound complicated, but thanks to one of the absolute best in-game tutorials I've ever seen for this playstyle, learning how to do this is possible without any prior knowledge of how these quirks work. The tutorial covers a bunch of different mechanics, and how they work, and slowly increases in difficulty until they player has mastered all the important stuff.

However, note, that I did not say that the tutorial was great. I said it was one of the BEST in-game tutorials I've seen for this playstyle, but that's mostly because every other in-game tutorial for this playstyle has been practically non-existent, so this one wins by default. In general, the tutorial is alright, but there are a few reasonably difficult sections that don't really get enough explanation to be easily understood. Even for myself, someone who DOES have experience with these playstyles (though not much), there were some sections that were fairly difficulty for me to get a hang of, and even caused frustration. I had absolutely no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea how air-strafes worked for the longest time, and though this tutorial did force me to figure it out, it was a somewhat painful process that could have been made a lot easier. I'm still not 100% on long-jumps, to be frank. Still, the fact that the tutorial is delivered through commentary nodes is a lot of fun, and the creator is pleasant to listen to, so that's neat.

Upon finishing the tutorial, the player can choose from a HUGE selection of maps, and go on to whatever game-type they want. However, this brings up another flaw of the game, in that there's practically no guidance whatsoever as to what maps are like. Sure, SOME titles (though not all) will have something like "surf" or "bhop" or whatever in it, but it doesn't offer any information as to aspects like difficulty of the map (some are ♥♥♥♥ hard), average time to beat, or anything. Something like this would have been extremely helpful for newcomers, but it's just not there. Also upsetting is the lack of info for the settings before launching a map, which include changing how the movement works a bit depending on what you're looking for as a player, with a CS:GO mode that works differently from the normal movement system. Again, credit where it is due, the fact that these settings exist is great, and if you don't want to have a slowdown effect upon every single landing, this stuff is fantastic, but the fact that these options aren't elaborated on really blows, as a person could play this for a long time and be really frustrated about certain things, only to realize they could have been easily fixed, if they had that prior knowledge.

What's also a fair bit upsetting is that, by default, the maps available to the player aren't really varied. The vast majority of them are climbing maps, which is all well and good, but as a result, there are far fewer bunny-hop and surf maps, and beyond that, an extremely small number of the other advertised game-modes. Hell, I think there's literally only 1 true deathtrap map out of the whole selection. This in particular was quite upsetting to me, since I was most looking forward to that in particular. Don't get me wrong, I know that death-run MP maps were generally the more popular option, but I would have liked to have a greater variety in the collection, as well as perhaps some other classic "fun" maps, like mazes, and stuff of the sort. I am curious as to why this selection was chosen specifically, as I would imagine many more people would have agreed to have their maps placed into a collection like this, and I would have liked to see this be a sort of extreme ultimate collection of basically everything possible in regards to classic course based fun, but perhaps I've got the wrong idea of the creator's intentions. There is a workshop, but of course, you can't rely on all the quality content being available on there, and the majority of maps for all the various game-modes are NOT on there, so, yeah, you'd still need to play through their respective source engine game to experience them. Shame, that.

Of course, I say this with no disrespect to the developer (or perhaps, more appropriately, compiler) of Kreedz Climbing. They are very helpful on the discussion boards, and clearly have a strong passion towards KZ, and this shows. It's just that I feel that Kreedz Climbing could have been so much more, and I'm not really certain why it wasn't, though perhaps the simple answer is that it would have just taken far too much effort to make it as the product I'm envisioning. I'm not sure, but whatever the reason is, I doubt it would have been anything that would reflect poorly on the creator of Kreedz Climbing. Of course, it still has the potential to become this, but it seems like there's no further development to be had on Kreedz Climbing, which makes me sad.

Kreedz Climbing is something I've wanted for a very, very long time. And though the end product, as it stands, without considering the workshop content (which isn't perfect either), is somewhat restricted compared to what it could have been, the reality is, for what it is, Kreedz Climbing is pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good, and with a rock solid price of IT'S ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FREE, you can't really complain all that much.

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