I'd add both Wind Waker and Call Of Juarez. Wind waker had a really good one and Call of Juarez had a Whip that you could use to traverse things very well and iirc was pretty well implemented.
I worked on a game heavily inspired by Speedrunners for a bit last year and I did a deep dive on the grappling hook in speedrunners and unfortunately the high level runners avoid it completely (there's way better tech to get and maintain speed on the ground). For mortals tho: super fun
yeah I was gonna go back and double check since I haven't played in awhile but my memory was it's a great traversal tool and feels highly responsive / sets up melee combat really well, but it feels like a zipline more than a grappling hook. Which is fine, but just not the same thing.
Yea there are a couple swing -> release traversal challenges in the game, but they didn’t feel particularly good to me.
The one thing that you might wanna check in there is the guardian ape fight, I think you can dodge using hook on the trees, but personally didn’t do that in my play through.
Tom Francis did one a while back called Floating Point, it's a very small free game, not too deep but worth checking out for a few minutes at least, the grappling feels real good!
Battlefield 2042 (very utilitarian but solid; does a really cool edge / ledge detection thing and does a super good job of usually putting you on top of the thing you wanna go on top of)
Overwatch (Hammond)
Also FWIW the Titanfall 2 grappling hook, which is already damn techy, got made better (???) and more difficult for Apex Legends. Give Pathfinder a try. His grappling hook alone easily has ~1000 hours of mastery in it.
Metroid Prime missing from the list after over 100 responses is surprising. Maybe it's not as integral or comes along too late, and so more easily forgotten or less impactful? It's a pretty unique first-person implementation of a grappling hook mechanic though.
(man I hate the Destiny 2 grappling hook with a passion, and embarrassingly I can't really tell you why. This is game designer malpractice, but I just know it made me go ick and then I never used strand again)
(on the low low off chance a D2 dev sees this, I'm so sorry, it's me, not you! I often don't vibe with movement tech for arbitrary reasons. I worked on Apex for almost 2 years and could never get into Pathfinder's grappling hook)
Thank you! I've just gone through that with wingsuits and uh there's so many bad wingsuits? I mean I get it, crafting games (looking at you, Enshrouded) wanna give you a shitty wingsuit at first to make you keep grinding for a better one but there should be a floor
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Having just played Sekiro, Im not sure I’d include it. It largely just felt like a way to do point-to-point traversal to me
The one thing that you might wanna check in there is the guardian ape fight, I think you can dodge using hook on the trees, but personally didn’t do that in my play through.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/302380/Floating_Point/
Battlefield 2042 (very utilitarian but solid; does a really cool edge / ledge detection thing and does a super good job of usually putting you on top of the thing you wanna go on top of)
Overwatch (Hammond)