There are so many fantastic video game open worlds out there, but many never require you to look up, let alone allow you to travel vertically. A flat map is often all you need to understand the distance between one location to another. I mean, what even is topography?
However, some game worlds do verticality well. Rather than having you only traverse north, east, south, and west, they add up and down to your options.Perhaps it’s going to the top of a skyscraper, or maybe the bottom of an ocean.It may even be as simple as going up and down a single story of a building, but doing so often.
As long as up and down are being considered, you have verticality, which is an extra layer to traversal and level design that will always be welcome.
10City of Glass
Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst
Mirror’s Edgeis a series all about running. Could you imagine how boring it would be if you could only run in a flat line? Thankfully, there’s plenty of verticality in the series.
Mirror’s Edge: Catalystis set on the rooftops of the fictional but beautiful City of Glass. The rooftops are, like in most cities, not uniform in height, meaning there’s plenty of vertical movement to keep things interesting.
Truthfully, the game would fall as flat as its map if it didn’t have that verticality in it. Good thing that’s not an issue in the City of Glass.You’ll be jumping, swinging, climbing, and wall running to get across the city as fast as possible.There are also points where you can use a grappling hook to swing over wide gaps. Just don’t look down.
What’s more vertical than the tallest mountain range in the world?Far Cry 4is set in the fictional country of Kyrat, which is supposed to be somewhere in the Himalayas.
There are plenty of ways to traverse the beautiful mountains of Kyrat, like wingsuits, which return fromFar Cry 3, or the grappling hook introduced in Far Cry 4. The grappling hook, in particular, allows for a lot of platforming puzzles that add variety to the gameplay.
There are also hang gliders and helicopters you can fly through the mountains, which can be extremely useful in the even steeper terrain of Northern Kyrat. Also, who doesn’t want to shoot a machine gun while flying through the air in a hang glider?
8Night City
Cyberpunk 2077
Fextralife Wiki
Johnny Silverhand may want to burn Night City to the ground, butit’s one of the best open-world maps out there, and is filled with verticality.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City has a mix of tall buildings, a ground level torace through in a wide assortment of cars, and plenty of underground sections that are woven through Night City for seedy people to hang out in. The city is like an onion. It has layers.
The cybernetic implants available in the game offer multiple movement buffs, like the fortified ankles cyberware that gives you a charged superjump.
This movement isn’t wasted as there are often alternate routes climbing up the outside of buildings. You know, in case you don’t feel like taking the stairs inside.
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
1800s London had much moreadvanced architectural technology than previous settingsfor theAssassin’s Creedseries, so it’s no surprise that the buildings inAssassin’s Creed Syndicateare much taller on average.
The buildings are so large that you’re given a grappling hook to speed up your travel, which comes in handy with iconic and tall buildings like Big Ben or St. Paul’s Cathedral. Climbing those without a grappling hook would just be tedious.
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate may not have the tallest building in the series, but most buildings are several stories high and many of them are enterable, creating much more verticality and variety than simply the rooftop and ground floor dichotomy of earlier Assassin’s Creed games.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
You see that mountain? You can climb it. Seriously, the mountains ofThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrimaren’t just scenic background pieces, but interactive parts of the world.
Skyrim is a legendary mountainous region of Tamriel, so it naturally has a ton of verticality. From the highest peak at the Throat Of The World, to the sulfurous springs of Eastmarch, to even the bottom of the Sea of Ghosts, there’s a wide range of heights to explorein this legendary map.
If you have the Dragonborn DLC, you can even use the Bend Will shout to ride dragons across Skyrim and Solstheim, which is probably everyone’s dream after first seeing Alduin in the opening.
5Pacific City
A big part ofCrackdownis collecting orbs to increase your genetically engineered agent’s powers, and one of those powers is agility. Agility determines how fast you run and how high you’re able to jump, which is crucial when it comes to chasing bad guys down across rooftops.
Since skill orbs are found in some way connected to the skill being leveled up, agility orbs naturally occur most frequently in high-up and hard-to-reach areas.
Luckily, Pacific City has no shortage of these areas.The level design takes advantage of the fact that a well-leveled agent has a vertical leap of nearly 40 feet, and has all sorts of parking garages, billboards, cliffs, skyscrapers, and other things to climb.
Pacific City is dense and lively, and always provides multiple options for carrying out your plans, whether that’s taking out bad guys, going on a collectathon, or just causing chaos.
4Central Gotham
Batman: Arkham Knight
Following the events ofBatman: Arkham Asylum, where several supervillains overran the namesake location, a section of Gotham was walled off to contain the villains. This larger, walled-off section became Arkham City, the namesake location forBatman: Arkham City.
Batman: Arkham Knight, on the other hand, takes place in the even larger and taller Central Gotham, which is the downtown section of the city with soaring skyscrapers like the Wayne Tower. It’s essentially every island in Gotham that wasn’t used in the previous games, which creates alarge area for a superherolike Batman to watch over.
The tall, detailed buildings of Central Gotham create a lot of verticality, which Batman takes full advantage of with his varied toolset, like a grappling hook or gliding with his cape. He is the Caped Crusader, after all.
3The Crater
Subnautica
When you think of verticality, your mind probably goes up to skyscrapers and mountains, but what about down to the murky depths of the ocean?Subnauticais all about exploring and surviving in the deep.
The Crater, the standard map for Subnautica, isa volcanic crater on another planet that goes down a little over 8 km, or roughly 5 miles, below sea level. Earth’s ocean has an average depth of less than half of that, so that’s very deep.
As your gear gets better, you’re able to progress deeper and deeper, which allows you toexplore new biomesand discover resources, as well as creatures who wouldn’t mind eating you as a snack. It’s a fantastic gameplay loop that works so well because the map is so interesting.
2New York City
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, not to be confused with theequally vertical PS2 classicSpider-Man 2 (2004), is set in towering New York City.
As an open-worldSpider-Mangame, verticality is mandatory. It wouldn’t be the same without the Web-Slinger swinging through the city and climbing buildings like the Empire State Building.
New York City, being Spider-Man’s home, makes for a perfect game world in the handful of Spider-Man games, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is no exception.Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is the largest version of New York City in the Spider-Man games.It’s the perfect playground for your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
Dying Light 2 Stay Human
The fictional city of Villedor inDying Light 2 Stay Humanis a parkour wonderland.
WhileDying Lightwas designed around parkour and movement, Dying Light 2 turned it up a notch and made things much taller. With tools like the grappling hook and paraglider, you’ll find yourself flying from skyscraper to skyscraper rather than just jumping from house to house.
The game world is designed around verticality, which creates a lot of variety in gameplay. You’re not simply fighting zombies, but also outrunning, outjumping, and climbing away from them when needed. However, keep in mind that you’re not the only person who knows how to run and jump.
