There has been many complaints about Crysis 2 (mostly from the PC community) since its release: restrictive level design, lack of mod support, awful graphical options, the fact that it says “adjust your TV” in the brightness options, less combat options, no DX11 support. All of these things scream consolization, and while the game is more “consoleized” the PC community seems pushed aside.
Gameplay in Crysis 2 revolves around the Nano suit, an advanced piece of battle armour designed to give the player different ability’s like increased strength and faster running speed, to impenetrable armour and cloaking.The first game took advantage of this greatly, you could tackle any combat situation in any way you wanted: go in with cloak mode enabled and slowly take out your enemy, or stack up on explosives and ammo and go in head first with a full on assault, or use a mixture of speed and strength to turn the game into a beat ’em up, or just avoid the enemy altogether.
The choices and options are what made Crysis so special and unique from all of the generic cover shooters we see today, and while some of that formula is still mixed in to Crysis 2 unfortunately it comes in a much smaller quantity. The problem is that the level design is much tighter than the first game (probably thanks to the fact that it’s based in a city while the first was a tropical jungle) The tighter design means getting from A to B is more linear.Although the first game wasn’t open-ended getting from point A to point B just felt more natural you weren’t heading down corridor after corridor, the environments aloud for two or more ways to get to your destination and that is something Crysis 2 just doesn’t do well at all.
Stealth is also much more difficult thanks to a bug causing the enemy to see right through your cloak sometimes and you have much more limited energy. This means you’ll probably ignore stealth half the time not because you want to, but because it’s quite pointless.Human A.I seems to take a turn for the worst, it’s not “awful” by any means, but it’s not great either; especially compared to the first game.We all agree that the last hour involving the Aliens from the first Crysis was pretty weak, thankfully Crytek listened and improved the Alien’s for Crysis 2 you actually fight them 60% of the time thought out the game.
They now feature a humanoid exoskeleton which makes them look much cooler and more natural to fight, the way they move around the environment is unbelievably awesome. You’ll be dazzled as they leap across gaps, run across walls and slide over the cityscape while trying to kill you.The alien A.I seems to be much better than the human A.I, the Ceph seem to be much more aggressive. The parties seem to know how to coordinate together and are able to attack you from multiple directions at once .As mentioned earlier the first game gave you options and that is still true of Crysis 2, but not the way PC weilders would like it. First of all you don’t get as many options as you did with the first game, everything is handed to you on a plate. Enabling your tactical visor on high terrain scans the area and suggests tactical options, which describe ways to engage the enemy. For example use stealth here or head down this path to flank etc.
This makes the levels feel planned out and comes off as contrived, obviously because the game is thinking for you. Actually executing these plans in combat diminishes the satisfaction.Also Crytek have felt the need to add in an upgrade system for the Nano suit, that’s fine actually, but it comes off as being tacked on. The way it works is every time you kill a Ceph they drop this weird energy and you use that as points to upgrade the Nano suit, but you’ll probably never use it as most of the power and “upgrades” barely do anything.The only useful upgrade is the cloak enhancement, but you won’t be able to use that until near the end of the game.
Now Crysis didn’t have a great story and it also wasn’t told well, the plot was standard FPS type stuff.Now it seems Crytek have put a much stronger focus on Crysis 2’s story.The characters were forgettable but the story was intelligent and interesting enough to keep you engaged and focused without giving you any hints as to what will happen next. The problem is how it’s told, the game uses standard cut scenes, flashbacks and scripted sequence’s to flesh out the plot, but you will have trouble following what’s going on. As a whole it’s just very hard to follow thanks to a few plot holes a lack of cohesiveness. It’s a shame because they really did have something good here.
Crysis 2 is the best looking game ever made just like its parent. It prevails in pretty much every way from the textures to the character models, the animations and environments. The game is absolutely marvellous but where the game really prevails is in its lighting.
Light bounces and cascades around the environment, whoever seriously built the light fixtures for this game deserves some respect.
The game will defiantly not become the new gaming benchmark it was prophesied to be (that spot still belongs to Metro 2033) probably because Crysis 2 doesn’t support DirectX 11(currently).The game has terrible graphical options, you’re only given three presets, High, Very High and Extreme, why there isn’t a Medium and Low setting is beyond comprehension.
The sound is beyond words of how incredible it is everything from the weapons and explosions to the smallest things like the reload effects. It all sounds amazing and defiantly deserves to be played with a surround sound system. The music is pretty average action movie stuff (that isn’t a complement by the way).
While I can’t compare Crysis 2’s Multiplayer mode to the original Crysis I can say that you will enjoy it. The Nano suit remains in Crysis 2’s multiplayer and it isn’t used as a gimmick. The whole structure of multiplayer is built around the Nano suit, everybody gets one and everyone has Cloak, strength, armour etc.Right from the start, it’s amazing how Crytek was able to balance all of this without anyone being able to exploit anything, sure there’s the occasional cloak camper but they are rare to find.
It features the now standard unlocks system like Call of Duty and helps keep you addicted for many weeks.The maps, range from great to average.
Besides a few niggling issues, the Multiplayer is fantastic and hopefully a community grows from it, like Call of Duty and Counter-strike did. One Major downfall currently within Crysis 2 are the amount of bugs and Bots, however Crytec are working around the clock to work out these issues, which is great for the community. It has been quiet heavily consolized yes, it defiantly doesn’t compete to the first game. It isn’t the new gaming benchmark we were promised, but you still get options even though they’re a little under minded.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
