Extreme Rock Climbing is a game in the Extreme Sports series of budget priced sport games. It uses three dimensional graphics that are viewed from a third person perspective with six different camera views. The game is mainly played by clicking with the mouse and a climb bar is used to determine the accuracy and energy use of a climb. On first click the bar starts moving up and the higher it goes the more energy is used. The second click decides the energy level and the bar will move down again towards a landing zone. With the third click the player has to stop the bar within the zone to complete the climb. Failing to hit the zone will lead to the player falling. The size of the zone depends on the difficulty of the climb. Three different items can be used during a climb: chalk which improves the grip, power bars that gives a boost of energy and biners that attaches a rope to a rock and thereby prevents the climber from falling all the way down.

There are ten different climbing spots with different difficulty levels and they can be played in any order. The player can choose from twelve different climbers although they differ only in appearance and have no effect on the gameplay. There are four different game modes although they mainly differ in the amount of equipment available: practice, free climb, solo climb and capture. The practice has no restrictions in what items can be used while in free and solo climb the player is limited to adding items to five slots. The solo climb differs in that biners are not available. In the capture mode the player's objective is collect a number of flags.