Crysis 2

Crysis was and still is a phenomenal must have title for the pc, it definitively showed off just how great pc gaming can be with its incredible graphics, gameplay and setting, its only flaw in my mind being that it took an expensive rig to run it (to this day my quad core beast of a machine can't run it on maximum settings without a little lag)I was hooked and a fan from the start, so Crysis 2 was my most anticipated major release for this year by a long shot (with the possible exception of Duke Nukem Forever if it indeed finally comes out)

Now I've just had a 2 hour playthrough so it's possible my first impression isn't a fair one but that's what it is, a first impression. As the title suggests I find it to be underwhelming and even slightly dissapointing. Lets get the good out of the way, the graphics are indeed excellent, however this is where the problem of making the game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 comes in, it's barely customisable which is unheard of for most pc games. In the first you could alter effects, motion blur, texture detail, water detail, you name it. In Crysis 2 all you get is a standard detail setting that's either low, medium, high, very high or extreme. I would've preferred the game had a far more customisable nature so that I could feel like I could get even more detail and performance out of it, as far as I know it doesn't even support direct x11 which is just stupid. It stands it's a little anticlimatic to know that the details I have it set at are literally as high as it'll go. It runs beautifully and looks great, but I feel if Crytek had focused on the pc version instead of the console versions they could've got even more out of it, and make no mistake, they have focused big time on the console versions as made obvious by the opening screen which says adjust your brightness until the image is barely visible on your tv.

Now gameplay wise is where the game completely underwhelms me, in the original cryis I vividly remember standing on top of a huge hill overlooking an enemy settlement, I mapped the entire area out with my binoculars and could approach the base from near enough any direction, I could attack outright from the beach to the left, or try crossing up stream to the right and over the wall, or taking out the petrol station from afar to create a diversion, its Korean jungle setting was wonderful and it made the game vast in scope and a genuine joy to experience. Crysis 2 has none of this so far, in comparison its a corridor shooter that consists of shoot guys in smallish town section, move along, see impressive yet completely uninteractive sequence, shoot guys, move along through linear sewer tunnell, grab tank, drive along road. Its fun don't get me wrong, but again just massively underwhelming when you consider how much fun the original was in comparison, it didn't always need giant sequences, it was so vast in scope and scale that playing it was as much fun as any giant cinematic you saw.

Then we finally come to the story, which frankly I was always a little dissapointed with from the moment the game was announced. The Korean island setting of the original was great, it was like a cross between the suspenseful hidden monster nature of Predator and the badass soldier feel from Halo, it was a classic investigate weird activity on island that goes wrong scenario. Crysis 2 just instead spits on not only the characters and ending from the first by practically ignoring them but changes the setting to a typical alien invasion in an American city setting. I'm not saying it doesn't work, it's pulled off far more convincingly than most other shooters that try it but once again it's just not on par with the superb setting of the first game. Even the aliens are pretty lowsy now, in the first they had this sinister mechanical monster look to them that kinda reminded me of sentinels from The Matrix, in Crysis 2 however so far they look fairly boring and cliched in comparison instead going for the bipedal footsoldier approach. And so far from my initial playthrough I don't really get what's going on as such, yes the aliens have attacked New York but why? who is Gould? why was Prophet helping him? I thought he had gone back to the island in the first? why are Cell bad guys? I can be a little unattentive at times but the story just seems like it's been thrown on as an afterthought to fit these large massively polished sequences together.

On the whole, Crysis 2 isn't a bad game by a long shot. As far as games go it's actually very good and I intend to play through to the end, but the reason I give it 3 out 5 is just that it's not on par with the first at all in my opinion and I my initial dissapointment with this probably won't go away no matter how much I enjoy the game. If you're a pure console gamer with a taste for shoot em ups chances are you'll absolutely love Crysis 2. Pc fanatics like myself though will most likely feel a tad cheated, it's a good game but not great so far. My rating may change in time, but we'll have to see. So far, 3/5.

New York City, 2023. Three years ago, evidence of alien life was discovered on the island of Linshan, claimed by North Korea. An ancient civilisation, the Ceph, had seeded bio-organice spacecraft known as 'spheres' under various points of the Earth's crust. American marines and special forces, spearheaded by soldiers wearing experimental 'nanosuits', engaged the Ceph and ultimately defeated them. However, a second sphere has now been activated under New York City. To clear the city the Ceph have released a deadly virus as a prelude to an all-out attack. As American military forces try to clear the city of millions of civilians, it falls to a marine to take up the nanosuit and engage not only the Ceph, but the corporation which created the nanosuit and now wants it back, by any means necessary.

Crysis 2 is CryTek's fourth game, following on from their brilliant 2004 debut Far Cry and the first two games in the Crysis franchise, Crysis and Crysis: Warhead. CryTek have two principal goals with their first-person shooters. The first is to deliver the most technically and graphically stunning games in the world, which they have ably achieved. The second is to create FPS games which break out of corridors and linear passages and try to give some freedom back to the player, allowing them to approach firefights and battles in a manner of their preference, or to even avoid them by using stealth. Crysis 2 continues this tradition as well, although in a much-less accomplished manner than its forebears.

The game opens with you on a submarine approaching New York. The sub is predictably destroyed by the aliens, but you are rescued by Prophet (a side-character in the original Crysis; the protagonists from the first two games do not appear in this one) and given his nanosuit to take the fight to the enemy. You are also engaged in battling the creators of the nanosuit, who send soldiers after you to try to recover it. Initially you are on your own, hounded by aliens and human soldiers alike, until you rescue a scientist (a walking exposition tool with no other characteristics) and learn more about what's going on. Then the US Marines arrive in full force and you team up with them to carry on the fight (sometimes in squad deployments with fellow troops, more often not). The storyline features much wibbling about nanotechnology and lots of grunting from manly soldiers (one of whom is a token female) about getting things done and leaving no man behind and so forth. To be honest, the storyline and writing are both forgettably generic, surprising as two of the better SF authors around at the moment (Peter Watts and Richard Morgan) worked on it.

Like its forebears, Crysis 2 presents the player with a mission objective and leaves you to decide how to accomplish it. The usual options are a head-on confrontation, a flanking maneuver, a sniping option or stealth. Rather disturbingly, the game assumes that you are too thick to figure this out on your own and walks you through these options each time you enter a combat area (though you can simply ignore this by not using the nanosuit's visor), but nevertheless the choice is good. Your nanosuit has several abilities which can help with these choices. It has an armour mode which renders you resistant (but not totally immune) to enemy firepower and a cloaking device which makes you invisible. Both abilities consume suit power (as does running and doing large jumps), and managing your power adds a fresh tactical perspective to the game.

The game employs the tiresome twin gimmicks of modern FPS games, namely cover and regenerating health. At least the nanosuit provides a reasonable in-game explanation for the regenerating health this time around, but the cover system means, once again, discovering areas and levels littered with convenient waist-high boxes and barriers everywhere which just looks silly. Fortunately, the cover system is optional (and you have to press a button to activate it, so you don't stick to walls automatically) and can be safely ignored by players who actually want to fight, rather than cowering behind walls. In fact, the nanosuit's armour option allows you to engage aggressively in combat and strikes a good balance between empowering the player and making them too invulnerable.

Weapon choices are fairly standard - shotguns, pistols, rocket launchers, machine guns - but do the job. They're chunky and satisfying to use, though rather greedy on the ammo. Luckily the game is absolutely littered with ammo dumps, so that's not a problem. The game also has melee options, including a formidable ability to pick up an enemy soldier (human or alien) and throw them a colossal distance. Whilst a bit overpowered, this does use up all your energy and takes a few seconds each time, so can't be used rapidly to clear a tight cluster of enemies. Combat is excellent, which is handy as it makes up 90% of the game, though enemy AI occasionally falters at long range (sniping becomes less of an option as the game proceeds, probably because of early sections where you can kill dozens of enemies with no-one around them batting an eyelid).

The tactical freedom to handle combat as you see fit, and the combat itself being great, are two important things that prop up the game. The third are the visuals. At launch Crysis 2 was, somewhat bizarrely, less impressive than the original Crysis. This was because serious compromises had to be made to fit the game onto consoles. Happily, CryTek released a later patch which added high-resolution textures and a DirectX 11 mode on PC, which transforms the game into something from another world. Graphically, Crysis 2 is the single most jaw-dropping game on the planet (supplanting its forebear, which must drop to second place). Aside from CDProjekt's visually stunning Witcher 2, nothing else comes close to it. It's a quantum leap forwards and shows what we can expect from the next generation of games. The atmospheric depiction of a shattered New York City (borrowing more than a few visual motifs from Escape from New York and Cloverfield) is another triumph, helped by some excellent music.

So, the game has great combat and stunning graphics. Where Crysis 2 runs into problems is with story. As I said before, the story is a somewhat generic piece of fluff about fighting off an alien invasion. The characters are walking fonts of exposition with no real sense of personality and no interesting or memorable dialogue. You fight, and have a good time fighting, but don't really care about the stakes or the other characters involved. The generic nature of the plot shouldn't be a problem, as it's basically an excuse to rationalise the huge explosions. What makes it offensive is that the game loves to rip control away from your hands every half hour or so for a tedious cut scene, a 'surprise' cliffhanging event (usually an explosion, fall or tidal wave ending with you being unconscious for a few moments) or, rage-inducingly, a Quick Time Event. Quick Time Events - in which normal game controls are suspended and you have to follow on-screen controls for a few minutes like a simpleton for absolutely no discernible reason - are the laziest of devices to use to make the player feel involved in the game, and frankly cost the game half a star by itself (luckily there's only a few of them in the whole game, otherwise it would have been more).

Crysis 2 (***½) laudably follows in its predecessors' footsteps by giving the player more freedom in how to play than most shooters. Unfortunately, its sense of freedom is considerably watered-down from its forebears (and Crysis was already substantially more linear than Far Cry) and then totally undone by its dependence on industry-standard but unnecessary fluff like cut scenes and Quick Time Events. If you can overlook these issues - and they are relatively restrained - then the impressive combat, mouth-watering graphics and the tactical options presented by the nanosuit combine to make it one of the better contemporary first-person shooters. The game is available now in the UK (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360) and USA (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360).

I have completed Crysis and Crysis Warhead several times and really enjoyed these two titles. That said it goes without saying that I decided that Crysis 2 is a must have.

The up side:

My rig is a Core 2 Duo, Geforce GTX280 running Win7 Ultimate 64-bit. After 3 years it is starting to age a bit but running Crysis 2 on full HD with all the options maxed out is a pleasure. Sure C2 only supports DX9 as the development teams had to compensate for the consoles that lag behind in that respect. But it looks great considering it runs via an API that was killed off when windows XP was dropped. The benefit of this is that a larger audience can share in the Crysis 2 experience as it was intended - Great!!!

You don't need a killer rig to run the game on mediocre settings not to mention the settings being maxed out. When Crysis was released it killed your high-end pc even in Windows XP on DX9, DX10 (Vista) looked great but killed your PC even more. It would be nice to have DX10 or 11 support for C2 to improve the visuals, but make no mistake, Crysis 2 is a pretty game in its own right. Some complain that they would have wanted more graphics options but there is no real need for that considering how well C2 runs on average hardware. It would be nice to adjust the anisotropic filtering and AA settings etc. but it is certainly not a problem.
The game play is good once you get used to how the nano suit function this time around. One can apparently customize your suit now still have to check that out. The environments look good and the AI is o.k.

The downside:

The story is not a direct continuation of the original Crysis story line. At the end of Crysis we were set up for a sequel that sadly may never see the light of day and this is disappointing. At this point the only thread of continuity between Crysis and C2 is the appearance of Prophet (I still need to complete the game so I could be wrong here). This does not mean that the story in C2 is poor but what happened in between the first and second game? Going back to the Island to kick some alien butt and poof we are in NYC a couple of years later. Some argue that this "reboot" of the story line is to bring console gamers in to the Crysis universe. Poor argument, have a look at how Mass Effect 2 was handled for the PS3 to bring that franchise to PS3 gamers.

It is only a 32-bit app so no native 64-bit support(Read console port), check point saves(Read console port) and for some the simplified nano suit could detract from the experience. I personally would have preferred being able to save the game when I need to and not being limited to checkpoints and auto saves. It would also have been nice to disable the hand holding by the game when it comes to announcing objectives when using the visor and it would have been great to have had the female voice for the nano suit.

None if these "issues" are game killers or detract from the experience though. C2 is an enjoyable game, has high production values and is quite a polished product. C2 can definitely stand on its own feet so I recommend getting it. I just really hope that Crytek follows through on the story as they were originally planning on doing a trilogy, perhaps they can even fill in the massive plot hole between C1 and C2. That would be really great.