Kreedz Climbing

Some mods manage to surpass the original games and become standalone games later on, such was the case with Counter-Strike back in the day, or Day-Z from a few years ago. However, few games have managed to inspire so many different mods over the years as Half-Life did, mainly because Valve made it so easy for fans to have fun with the engine. Hence, almost every Counter-Strike fan knows the KZ climbing maps, and you can now enjoy them in a standalone version sporting the same Source engine.

  Kreedz Climbing is the free-to-play version of the popular Half-Life and Counter-Strike maps that require players to use precise jumping skills and a lot of patience in order to navigate tricky environments. The goal is to make it to the top as quickly as possible, and you can use a timer to improve your score over multiple runs. To make things better, you can do all this together with other players.   There are many maps to choose from, over one hundred of them, so there’s definitely enough content to keep you busy for a long time. You can try the tutorial to get you started on the basics, but the truth is that newcomers might have a very hard time learning what they need to do, especially since the way up is not always obvious. The mechanics are very tricky to get right and they require a lot of practice.

Besides getting a better time, it is also possible to earn medals for your efforts, which are pretty neat if you like to collect things or hunt achievements. However, the best part is that you are free to create your own maps and let your imagination run wild, which is easier to achieve than using the actual Source engine SDK. It’s still not a cakewalk, but at least you can easily test your maps with ease.   As far as the graphics are concerned, this is still the old Source engine, so do not expect anything too great. In fact, it looks wildly outdated for this day and age, especially in terms of textures and post-processing effects. This is probably by design, on the other hand, since the game was designed to appeal to old-school fans of the mod.

Kreedz Climbing is not very easy to approach if you have no knowledge of its origins, but you can still learn to love it with a lot of practice and just enough patience. However, it’s the perfect product for veterans looking for an easier way to play KZ and create maps.