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What are some games in which movement itself is a joy?
I just started playing AER: Memories of Old which allows your character to transform into a bird and fly around a sky world of islands. I was struck by how good the flight feels in-game. The sense of speed, control, and freedom was immediately satisfying. I've spent most of the game not actually doing what I'm supposed to but just enjoying the ability to swoop, dive, and get from one point to another in a novel way.
It made me curious: what other games are out there in which just the act of moving your player avatar around is engaging, interesting, or fulfilling?
Mirror's Edge. There was a flow to that game that felt like the promise of Assassin's Creed fulfilled.
My brother mocked it as "the game with the red door". For the longest time I didn't understand why he didn't like the game. You just made me think of it again, and I think it's because he only ever saw me play it, never played it himself. No wonder he didn't get it.
I'm not sure how they could work in those controls, but I'd love that game to come to VR.
I really loved the original game and subsequent reboot. The colours were really beautiful to look at and movement was a joy, I might actually dig it out again to play.
Both Ori and the Blind Forest & Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Ori 1 is one of the very few games I have ever 100%ed (all collectables, side-quests, item upgrades, etc), which happened purely because even after finishing the story I was still enjoying just navigating around the world so much that I decided to keep going and grab everything I had missed along the way.
Ori 2 I didn't 100%, but by the end of the game I had pretty much done everything already anyways, since I knew what to expect from the first game and so took the to time to get all the secrets/collectables/side-quests as I played through the story. The only thing I really had left to do at the very end was to grind currency by killing creatures in order to purchase more combat skill upgrades, which meh.
Edit: It was just pointed out by a friend with the game that I didn't actually finish the race shrines in Ori 2 either... so that is something I will probably actually go back and do! :P
Vague Ori 2 spoilers
I've been playing Ori 2, and just finished up with the escape from the mill. The sequence was incredible to run through and I was disappointed it was over, but I guess that would be better than the first game where they dragged on forever.Also vagueish spoilers (but not really)
Wait til you get to the second to last escape... it's insane! I also found it super hard, but it was easily my favorite of the series. The very last escape was super dramatic but not quite as good (mechanically speaking) though, IMO.
p.s. I agree that some of the first game's escapes did drag on just a bit too long sometimes too. Though I only remember dying a few times during them, so I didn't find them too bad overall.
What made that part really special for me was the music. It sounds like a remix of the music that ran during the ginso tree escape in the first game, but way better
Titanfall 2 can be really fun. You can wall run, double jump, and there's a grapple tool you can choose too. It's fun trying to make it across the map with as much wall running and grapple-launching as possible. I wish there was a 'the floor is lava!' mode.
Spiderman also has great movement and the web-swinging is a unique way to get around. The actual gameplay is super repetitive but I almost never fast-travelled.
In that vein, Apex Lrgrnds feels pretty good compared to other battle royal games
When I play that and switch to another, everything feels way slower and less enjoyable.
Nobody for Quake? I never really got into the race maps or anything like that, but jumping/flying around in quake was always really enjoyable for me. Been having an itch to play an arena shooter again too...
this will get my vote. The game changed everything. If you had an opengl graphics card back then it was so fucking cool. I remember asking for a pure3d for christmas one year. my family didn't understand why.
The obvious example of Ori comes to mind but @cfabbro already mentioned it.
One which probably nobody will mention is One Finger Death Punch. Here's the late Totalbiscuit's review (gameplay at 2m18s).
In that game, there are only two moves possible: Punch left and punch right. You move by punching. Watch the video, it'll make sense. It does feel amazing.
The one thing that would bring me back to Warframe is racing. I loved racing other players to exits at the end of missions and the feeling of nailing that bullet jump to sneak under an awkward door flying past the two guys that caught the lip. It never got old.
I heard the developers had hinted at a race mission that was tabled due to issues, breaks my heart.
Edit: the challenge rooms never did it justice and the lua halls are too cryptic to feel like a race.
Portal - "Speedy thing goes in speedy thing comes out"
Portal 2 - That with the addition of excursion tunnels, jump plates, and speed and bounce gels
Portal 2 always annoyed me so much with the lack of portal-able surfaces. The end part of Portal 1 did as well. I like FREEEEEEEDOM.
This was the fun of Saints Row IV for me. Ridiculous superpowers enable you to navigate the city in a fantastically overpowered (and entertaining) manner.
Subspace/Continuum. The best way to describe it was like a multiplayer evolution of an asteroids game. My dad/uncles used to play it together in the 90s and I continued to play it intermittently for several decades afterwards. Every ship had strictly forward & reverse thrusters and decaying planar momentum (kind of hard to explain, if you were moving at some speed and stopped providing thrust, your velocity would decay to some non-zero constant but if you started accelerating perpendicular to the direction you are moving, the transverse component of your velocity would eventually go to zero). Ships would also bounce off of walls.
Bullet and bomb velocities were all relative to your ships' speed which made dogfighting incredibly satisfying. All of the dynamic parameters (top speed, acceleration, turn rate, etc) were configurable for each ship and different for each zone/server that you might join. The other thing that tied in to the movement was the HP of each ship. Each ship had an energy bar that would be expended every time you fired a bullet or a bomb and regenerated at a constant rate. The energy bar doubled as the ship's HP. This meant that spamming weapons on an enemy would cost you health. This energy system relates to the movement in that you could activate thrusters to increase your ships acceleration at the cost of some constant energy/s. This made it easier to dodge but would also leave you weaker.
The thing that I remember most fondly was this little black-hole feature that could be added to the maps. It would create gravitational fields around it which grew stronger with proximity. You could achieve stable orbits and modify your orbit or slingshot yourself. If you got sucked all the way in, it would teleport you somewhere random.
I first downloaded this game of Tucows in 1995 when it was still in alpha called Sniper, I was 14 at the time, I still play it from time to time. My friend downloaded it shortly after and just the other day his squad won the Pro League.
One of my favourite moves in this game was to "mine" the wormholes. If you angled it right you could get bombs orbiting the wormhole with extremely tight orbits at incredible speed. Eventually someone would come shooting through attempting to flee someone else and intending to use the wormhole either as a slingshot or teleport, but would collide with 4 or 5 bombs instead.
I played Sunset Overdrive a few months ago through Xbox Game Pass, and the movement/traversal in it is insanely good. Once you have access to all of the movement abilities, you can dash, grind, wall-run, and bounce across the city at high speed and get just about anywhere smoothly without even slowing down.
The game has a ridiculous amount of collectibles scattered around the city, and while I didn't end up collecting all of them, I went after way more than I expected simply because the movement was so enjoyable and it was fun just to figure out how to get to different places on the map. I was constantly impressed by how well-laid-out everything was to make the movement feel so perfect.
PilotWings 64 on N64 was lovely, especially once you unlocked birdman. At the time it felt amazing having this enormous island to fly around.
Not sure if it counts, but Sega Rally Championship on Sega Saturn really nailed the handling for an arcade racer.
It definitely counts! Racing is pretty much an entire genre built around the joy of movement.
I never played Sega Rally Championship on the Saturn, but I did play and love Sega Rally 2 on the Dreamcast. It, like you said, absolutely nailed the handling.
Spider-man 2 (console version). I'd get a Gamecube or something just for that game.
Seconding. The 2000s Spider-Man games were pretty great, although having tried playing a few of them again on emulator a few years ago, other than the nostalgia factor they unfortunately don't really hold up all that well anymore.
Thankfully the new 2018 Spider-Man looks like it has absolutely amazing movement mechanics in it too though, however since it's a PS4 exclusive I haven't had a chance to play it yet myself and have only watched some Let's Plays of it instead. Hopefully it comes to PC eventually like a bunch of the other PS4 exclusives have now too!
A Story About My Uncle has a pretty neat movement mechanic. You have a glove that sends out an electrical tether that can attach to just about anything. So you can shoot it at a wall or ceiling and swing on it. But of course they make it more interesting than that. You can also shoot it at moving things, so you end up tethered to something moving and jumping from object to object. It's quite fun!
Destiny 2 for me. The class l'm playing can fly for short periods, dash forward and move around mid-air. I'm practically flying all the time and do it without noticing just because it's fun and useful.
The game also has Sparrows which are hoverbikes with a boost function, love just driving those around across the map since it steers so fluidly.
Another one is GTAV's aircraft. l've been playing this for a while and the Buzzard helicopter controls are pretty much an extension of my arms now. Same for the Seabreeze, a very fast and tough seaplane that can take off from a runway of 10m and land on one of 100m (or less if you do it right). I often just log on to online to just fly around and do sightseeing
Third one: Space Engineers. While not really a good game(buggy, developers constantly make odd choices, development has kinda stalled), the 6-degrees-of-freedom system is pretty nice. In most games, you can only look to right above and below you. In space engineers, this depends on your reference to gravity, and if there is none or if you're using the jetpack, you can spin around freely and fluidly.
In multiplayer l've frequently been building with friends, with one person hovering upside down near the 'floor' working on things.
Same goes for the ships; if you have thrusters in all directions, flying upside down or sideways is totally possible.
Edit: guess l just really like flying mechanics. Am bird, after all.
Man, I miss Titan skating in D1. That was something they should have kept in.
So much about the core D2 gameplay feels so buttery smooth. I was really reluctant to stop playing when I gave it up last fall, but the grind and the reward systems were really starting to feel awful for me. I still consider picking back up from time to time, but I just don't want to devote the time to grinding that I feel like I would need to.
Yep it's grindy as hell. Same for GTAV Online, which is why I pretty much just boot both games up time to time to screw around with friends or use it as a flight simulator / zoom around in D2 and shoot some baddies.
Not really grinding anymore unless it's worth it (usually, not).
Visually and in terms of core functionality, good games. Mechanics, not so much.
I mentioned this in the Classic Games thread, but Descent is either a joy or sickness-inducing depending on your constitution. It's a 3D game where you're flying a spaceship through a series of mines, and the idea of "up" is very fluid. Some people love the freedom, but others find it very off-putting. YMMV.
I'd like to go the opposite way of everyone else here. The Suicide of Rachel Foster, slow, calm, no fast movements, no jumping around. But walking in that game was a pleasure, it felt real unlike most games I've ever played. The camera bobbing with each step, the sounds that matched every surface I stepped on, it felt as if I was part of the game. I have a few criticisms of other aspects of the game though, the voice acting of the main character was pretty bad, some dialogues felt forced and unrealistic, and while advancing through the story was interesting the end was disappointing.
I'm surprised no one has mention Tribes: Ascend (and other Tribes games).
I love the movement in that game: by holding right click, you fly upwards using a jetpack (has limited fuel, only recharges when you're on the ground), and when holding space, you go frictionless and slide around, called skiing.
The maps were covered in hills. To move around quickly, you wanted to ski (go frictionless) downhill, and jetpack uphill. Definitely the most interesting movement I've seen, and it made for incredibly fast-paced gameplay.
Here's a video I found showing it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwkul_gBJzg
The Dishonored games have a really satisfying sense of movement. Similar to Mirror's Edge in that you're locked into a 1st person perspective and your hands interact with surfaces in the game world. Dishonored doesn't feature any elaborate parkour but there's plenty of running, jumping, sliding, swimming, sneaking, and peeking around corners. The real fun starts when you unlock supernatural abilities that let you warp around and pull items/enemies toward yourself. Clever use of the abilities can take you down surprising paths through the environment, traversing under, over, or around the map through places that appeared unreachable. The combat is also pretty visceral and satisfying.
There's some love in here for good handling in driving games, and I want to throw Crazy Taxi into the list. It's not a realistic sim game but it feels great when you've mastered your car and know the map and where all the routes are. A skilled player can extend the 50 seconds of allotted time into an hour or more. Crazy Taxi 2 is a great sequel as well, the addition of a "jump" mechanic adds a new verticality to the game. You can leap over entire buildings and discover tons of shortcuts.
Crazy Taxi isn't one that would normally come to mind, but you're absolutely right! The built-in techniques like Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift were really satisfying to use, and adding in the hop in the second opened up the Drift Hop, which totally changed the game. They even had a whole series of minigames based around these moves with the Crazy Box in CT1 and the Crazy Pyramid in CT2.
Gris felt quite good, with the added bonus of being a really beautiful game
The Stanley Parable. To say much more than that is to ruin the experience.
Felix The Reaper is just fun to watch an agent of death boogie his way through his workday with dreams of his love.
I agree with many of the games here but I'll also add The Outer Wilds.
Piloting the ship is very smooth but my favourite is using the jetpack and getting advantage of the planet's curvature to circumnavigate at great speeds.
I played it with Keyboard+Mouse and it's supposed to be even better with a joystick.
Pubg no doubt
I don't play it no more but I never played anything that I felt I had so much control of thee character.
The latest 3d mario games. Absolutely a blast to play. Also doom eternal; man the traversing terrain, the quick movements of dash, double jump, climbing walls. You can really get creative with killing the hordes of demons. I unlocked a longer glory kill attack and I can move between ledges with it and it's awesome.
I can't say enough about doom eternal, lots and lots of unlocks, collectables which you can revisit the levels and go back and improve your stats with collectables you missed. Really scratches the FPS RPG itch in me.
I will also second the new 3D Mario games, especially Odyssey. This game is the spiritual successor to Super Mario 64 that I have been waiting for!