History Main / LadderPhysics

** This looks ridiculously stupid in multi-player games, watching players ''walk'' up ladders - even sillier if they're crouching, because the player appears to be levitating up the ladder from a kneeling position. Egregious in supposedly realistic settings like ''VideoGame/CounterStrike'', though at least climbing the ladder makes your gun horribly inaccurate.

* Averted in the Franchise/AssassinsCreed series, where free running is one of the main mode of getting around.

* In the original ''VideoGame/FarCry'', you couldn't use weapons on ladders, but the controls on the ladder are relative to how you got on the ladder. So it was possible to go down a ladder facing away from it, which also made it possible to run ''off'' the ladder to varying degrees of pain or death depending from how high you fell off.

* The ladders in ''VideoGame/QuakeII'' are like glue: once you're attached to them, there's no way in Hell you're going to get off unless you've reached the top or bottom. Need to jump off? Not bloody likely unless you're playing on a source port.

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Much like JumpPhysics, characters in video games don't usually tend to interact with ladders the way people in real life do. These things range from climbing ladders apparently without needing to use arms (i.e. keeping them free to fire large weapons, like the {{BFG}}), to [[NotTheFallThatKillsYou completely breaking one's fall]] simply by grabbing them. Also, in many cases you'll be able to rotate your view a full 360 degrees while attached to the ladder, with no physical restraints. Sometimes, it's even possible to 'jump' up the ladder, or climb up backwards.

* ''VideoGame/GodOfWar'' features a few ladders which Kratos either jumps up five rungs at a time or slides down the arms. However, the real fun comes when Kratos climbs masonry or cliff faces. Using his blades as pitons, he stabs the wall the direction he wishes to go when going slow or takes giant leaps between wall sections, stabbing the wall with both blades when he gets there. To top it off, he can also still attack enemies with his blades, and even grab them and throw them off the wall.
** ''God of War II'' ups the ante by letting Kratos also climb the ''ceiling''. Not only can he still attack, but he can also catch an enemy with one blade while hanging on to the other, pull it towards him, and smash it into the ceiling several times while sticking to the ceiling like glue.

* Similar to the ''Jak 3'' example above, whenever Sora (and his friends) climb up a ladder in ''[[{{VideoGame/KingdomHearts}} Kingdom Hearts]]'', it's realistic.

* Though ostensibly a bug rather than a deliberate aversion, the original ''VideoGame/MegaMan'' deserves a mention for making your one-armed hero fall off of a ladder whenever the game is paused.

** In ''VideoGame/MegaManX 2'' and ''X3'', X uses both arms to fire a charged shot once upgraded. Which means falling off any ladders you might be holding on to.

* There are some really long ladders can take an annoyingly long time to climb, especially in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime''. ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess'' speeds Link up a bit.

* ''ShadowComplex'' averts this by treating ladders fairly realistically. You can climb ladders as normal, you can climb them quickly up to the limits of your stamina (which quickly increases as you level), you can slide down them (friction burns are ignored, but later on you get armor, so then it's okay), shoot from them by holding on to the ladder with one hand (but you're not climbing up or down while you do this, and it takes a moment as you stop and pull out your firearm and put it away, and this doesn't address the issues of recoil while holding an AK-47 with one hand), ''reload'' with one hand (again, you're stuck on the ladder in one spot while you reload, with a lead-in and lead-out time), and once you get the jet pack, you can even slide ''up'' the ladder. Which looks kind of awesome.

* ''VideoGames/DarkSouls'': You and your enemies (if they can climb them) can't do much of anything on a ladder other than move up and down. You ''can'' do some swiping/kicking attacks if there's an enemy on the same ladder, but they are weak and their purpose is more to make the other guy fall off than to kill them.

* ''GearsOfWar'' averts this trope in the most badass way possible. Players climb ladders with one arm, leaping from rung to rung with pull-ups, and climb down ladders by leaping off the top, grabbing the ladder half way down to slow their fall and flip back upright, then drop the rest of the way to the ground. You can't do anything else during these scripted climbing sequences, but since ladders are extremely rare, never very long and you climb them ridiculously fast it doesn't really matter.

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* In ''LaTale'', ladders can be grabbed while jumping or falling. Due to a graphical glitch, the character's hands and feet never quite line up with the rungs, either.

* Ladders aren't subject to many unusual movement styles in the ''SmackdownVsRaw'' games, or the earlier Smackdown ones. Aside from being OK to dive off them onto someone and being able to walk away, or being able to smash someone with it and have the victim be able to walk away.

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* ''VideoGame/FirstEncounterAssaultRecon'' takes the most realistic approach to the ladders in its thirst for averting FirstPersonGhost: your character is shown mounting the ladder from either up or down, you can see your arms and legs gripping it as you climb. As you might expect, even looking any further than 60º away from the ladder's vertical axis is essentially impossible. However, you can harmlessly break a fall by grabbing on to one, and your character will simply place himself on it just like if you'd grabbed it while standing on the ground - this is rarely noticeable aside from a certain bit at the end of ''Extraction Point'', the first game's first expansion pack.

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* ''LegacyOfTheWizard'', where it was a matter of course just to jump up all those zillions of long ladders you face, since it's faster than just pressing Up.

* ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'': In ''VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved'', your character runs up ladders instead of climbing them (similar to the ''VideoGame/HalfLife'' example). Which means not only can you climb and shoot, you can let go and climb back up, so long as your character's looking up. The developers realized the inherent silliness of this trope, but originally had no real way of fixing the ladders without breaking the pace. Solution? They replaced almost every ladder in the game with gravity lifts in ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}''. The ladders made a few reappearances in the ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'', but have been absent ever since.

* Similar to the ''VideoGame/HalfLife'' example, in ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'', Master Chief and the Arbiter run up ladders, not climb them. Which means not only can you climb and shoot, you can let go and climb back up, so long as your character's looking up. The developers realized the inherent silliness of this trope, but have no real way of fixing the ladders without breaking the pace. Solution? They've replaced practically every ladder in the game with gravity lifts. The ladders make a reappearance in the ''Halo 3'' campaign.

* Climbing up a ladder in ''Jak3Wastelander'' works pretty much exactly like in real life. If you walk up to one you automatically put your weapon away to grip the sides with both hands.

* The earlier ''Franchise/{{Castlevania}}'' games, while lacking in ladders, had stairs that behaved rather frustratingly: you couldn't jump on or off of them (until the SNES ones), and often you were attacked by GoddamnedBats as soon as you were situated atop them (though they at least couldn't [[LedgeBats make you fall to your doom]] while you were "glued" to the stairs). Even in the SNES games, it's still possible to fall ''through'' the stairs if you don't explicitly press Up or Down to climb them; this often results in death.
** ''VisualNovel/{{Snatcher}}'' on the Sega CD firmly lampshades this with a conversation between the main characters about teenage suicide rates in regards to ''Castlevania'''s stairs.
* ''VideoGame/{{La-Mulana}}'' has very frustrating ladders: while you can use your weapons (main weapons, at least) while on ladders, you have to start climbing them from the bottom or the top; you can't jump or even ''walk'' onto the middle of ladders. You can't jump off ladders, either, but taking any hit while on a ladder, usually from [[CollisionDamage colliding]] with GoddamnedBats, sends you falling to the bottom. You also can't climb down a ladder if its top is the foot of the screen above it, which makes it easy to get caught in traps.
** ''MazeOfGalious'', which ''La-Mulana'' is largely derived from, is much the same way with ladders.

* ''ProjectIGI'', a FPS, did third-person, unarmed ladder climbing back in 2000.

* ''VideoGame/TimeSplitters: Future Perfect'' would zoom out to a 3D view of Cortez climbing the ladder realistically, during which you couldn't really do anything except go up or down. You never really need to fire and climb at the same time anyway, so it's more a neat little graphical trick than an attempt at realistic gameplay (this is ''Time Splitters'', after all).

* ''FarCry 2'' doesn't have very many ladders, but yes, you climb them pretty realistically and can see your arms grabbing the rungs.

* The ladders in ''VideoGame/QuakeII'' are like glue: once you're attached to them, there's no way in Hell you're going to get off unless you've reached the top or bottom. Need to jump off? Not bloody likely.

* ''VideoGame/FirstEncounterAssaultRecon'' takes the most realistic approach to the ladders in its thirst for averting FirstPersonGhost: your character is shown mounting the ladder from either up or down, you can see your arms and legs gripping it as you climb. As you might expect, even looking any further than 60º away from the ladder's vertical axis is essentially impossible.

Another frequent trope is when a ladder with free space from both sides is only climbable from ''one'' side. This is done to avoid frustration (you don't want to climb a long ladder for ten seconds only to find out at the top that you climbed the wrong side and can't get up on the platform), though it can be annoying if you want to quickly latch onto a ladder to escape something on the ground. Besides, you'd think your character could just move to the other side of the ladder... Maybe they're too afraid to do something that risky?