Introduction:
I never had the pleasure of playing through the campaign of Crytek’s first Crysis game, managed to run it for about two hours on my computer before giving up. Since it was a product designed to push the very limits of your computer, my standard desktop didn’t have a chance. This was a shame because I was told that Crysis was a fun and entertaining game.
Roughly a month ago the studio released their new game – Crysis 2. Luckily they made the choice to develop it for not only the computer but also Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. In my opinion this was a good tactical move, however people like me who didn’t have a chance to play the first game are thrown into a story you know very little about. The main reason why I bought Crysis 2 wasn’t that I thought the story would be great, or any good at all but rather because of the gameplay and tactical choices I read about in other reviews. You see – I love to strategize.
Story and Gameplay:
As I mentioned I was thrown into the story without knowing the main character’s names, when the game starts they mention a researcher named “Gould” and that your group of marines have to retrieve him from the center of New York. Not much information is given above that until your submarine is attacked and sunk without warning and you’re pulled out of the sea by someone calling himself “Prophet”. He says that he’s the last soldier sporting one of the advanced Nanosuits, that you have to pick up his work of protecting Gould and help him find a cure for a disease spreading through New York City.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
After that you’re pretty much on your own, until Gould messages you, confusing you with Prophet and says that he needs assistance. Crysis 2 has all in all a very weak storyline; you’re stringed along by a bunch of objectives that doesn’t really give you enough incentive to follow them. You go through the motions anyway, that is if you want to progress through the story.
There was also a lot of talk about the choices you can make during different missions but I don’t know what the big fuss is about. When you enter a new area you are presented with a few options ranging from “stealth” and “supplies”. At one point I wanted to just pass the place by sneaking past so I chose to go after the stealth option and what I found was a drain where I could jump down and continue on. After emerging on the other side I noticed that I had travelled like twenty meters while the passage through the drain felt like being more than eighty. Not only that but when I jumped up there was a squad of enemies standing right next to it who spotted me while cloaked and opened fire.
As I said the options really don’t help your situation, the only ones you should pay attention to are the resupply depots in case you run out of ammunition. Crysis 2 is also way too easy if you upgrade your stealth ability so you can run without it draining too fast, when you’ve done that you can simply run through the levels and stealth-kill your enemies from behind. Your upgrades are still available if you finish the game and start one on the hardest difficulty, a map that took me roughly an hour on normal only took fifteen minutes on the outmost difficulty.
Another thing I don’t understand is why all the different abilities are linked to the very same energy source, or why simply hitting someone with the butt of your weapon drains it as if Alcatraz (the main character) hasn’t worked out for twenty years. You also have the ability to grab an enemy by the throat to throw them away… about thirty centimeters, this also includes explosive barrels, chairs, laptops and tables which is the reason behind me not understanding why Crytech has an achievement that requires you to kill enemies with thrown objects.
Lookin' hardcore? I sure am.
The suit also drains power when running which is probably one of the most annoying things about this game, I can’t even count how many times I’ve started running down a deserted street, met a bunch of enemies, tried to cloak but can’t because the energy is too low and this has in turn lead to my untimely death. It’s a broken system if you ask me; they should have had separate bars for running, stealthing/armor ability and no drain at all for picking up enemies or hitting them.
Music and Graphics:
One of the things that blew me away were the graphics, even though I can’t run the game on full resolution when playing on my Xbox 360 the graphical quality was still excellent. But even a game as good looking as this can’t escape from pixilation, this happened quite frequently and mostly when looking closely at discarded newspapers or broken roads.
When it comes to music, I’d like to say that it’s good, sets the mood and picks up when it has to. However, I didn’t pay much attention to it throughout my two playthroughs and wasn’t something to cheer about. If you truly want musical talent that shows go buy games such as Alan Wake, Vanquish or L.A. Noir.
Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.
Multiplayer:
I’ve pretty much only got two things to say about the multiplayer section of Crysis 2 – broken and boring. They tried to “spice it up” by making the player be able to use abilities like armour and stealth, this way you have to think on your feet and activate the right ability at the proper occasion but when using stealth you shine quite bright in either red or blue depending on what team you’re on. This can also be quite confusing if you played on the blue team for three matches and then switched over to the red one, found myself many times being killed by stealthed players I thought were on my team. One final thing – the lag, it’s unbearable and the biggest annoyance when playing Crysis 2 online.
Final Thoughts:
I felt as if Crytek bit off more than they could chew and tried to do a lot of things at once which ended up with all of them turning out half-assed. The single thing I count as something positive is the graphics, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m the only serious reviewer that gives Crysis 2 such a low score. I’m sorry, I’d like to give it more but I’m not getting paid anything for finding the imaginary good things in this heap of broken mechanics and boring storyline.
Design: 8.8
Story: 4.1
Gameplay: 5.2
Presentation: 5.7
