- Nov 3, 2009
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Crysis 2 has stirred up a lot of controversy about "consolitis" and graphics prowess, but no one seems to be talking about the actual game itself much.
Let me preface by saying I am a FPS junkie. Been one since long before FPS games became the dominant genre. I've played a lot of them, going back to more obscure titles like Bungie's pre-Halo masterpiece, Marathon, to classics like Half-Life, and lesser known ones like No One Lives Forever and Project IGI. I've sank countless hours into Quake III: Arena, Unreal Tournament, and Counter-Strike Beta (5.2-6.1). I'm not saying all of this to try and sound "cool," but more to convey that I'm not a ADHD fourteen-year-old spaz with COD fever. I'm also not a fanboy in any shape or form; I call it as I see it. I have two Xbox 360s, a PS3, and the PC listed below in my signature, which was built last April with the sole purpose of playing the original Crysis and Warhead, so I'm not new to the Nanosuit or any of the characters.
So let's get to it. I just finished the SP campaign on the Veteran difficulty level (which is third out of the four difficulties; Super Soldier is the hardest). It took me approximately 7 hours and 30 minutes, which was me moving at a moderate pace (not rushing, not inspecting every nook and cranny). I played it on the Xbox 360 as I'm no home in Germany with my PC right now, but had been anticipating this game for a while, and didn't feel like waiting another eight months.
Honestly, you can't ignore the graphics. As much as I tried, this game is freaking gorgeous. CryTek can pat themselves on the back, because the politics of "console port" and Direct X 9 vs DX11 aside, the game is flat out breathtaking. Even on 19" Panasonic Viera LCD TV with my Audio Technica noise-cancelling headphones, I was sucked into the world they created. Sure, the resolution on the 360 is clearly up-scaled (like most games), and the frame rate does drop during intense firefights. But it's never unplayable, and it's easily the most visually impressive title on the 360. The things that's most jaw-dropping about it is unlike a game like, say, KillZone 2, which is graphically impressive but is very dark, linear and almost a corridor shooter at times, or Halo: Reach, which is very open but features simple, spartan environments, Crysis 2 features these open, complex vistas, with gorgeous lighting and environmental effects. I remember being very impressed with the Frostbite engine in Bad Company 2 on the 360, but Crysis 2 outdoes even that.
Anyone that says Crysis 2 sold out and went Call of Duty hasn't played the campaign. I can't comment on MP because my internet isn't fast enough for me to get on XBL. But the SP is FAR from the heavily-scripted, narrow-path stuff of Black Ops or Modern Warfare. Honestly, I enjoyed the SP tremendously, and would even go so far as to rank it one of my favorite campaigns in recent memory.
Those nostalgic of the first will complain about the city in place of the tropical island, and how the island was more sandbox-like. This isn't really true, however. The island in the first game is more open, yes, but a lot of that is just empty terrain. The reality is that Crysis 1 always guided you towards an objective. The fact that you can't just run off a few kilometers in a random direction now is kind of a trivial loss because it didn't really add anything to the first game. If your objective was to take out a radar tower, regardless of how far you ran off on the beach, you still had to come back to that tower. And once you're in the tower base, all that empty space on the beach doesn't really matter. Are the levels in Crysis 2 smaller? Yes, but they're still HUGE by modern standards. Are they linear? NO. You can still approach every combat situation with your own style, and the urban design even adds verticality to the equation (a worthy addition I can't stress enough). Crysis was never meant to be a free roam, huge open world like Fallout or Oblivion. It's an action-shooter. With Crysis 2, they've simply cut some of the dead space between battlegrounds. The battlegrounds themselves are fantastic. The level design is truly top-notch, and unlike other games which ask you to replay them to hunt trophies or whatever (though this game has those two), the battlegrounds in Crysis 2 really make you want to replay each section and go, "Okay, so I snuck through the sewer that time. What if I had tried jumping the scaffolding instead?"
The Nanosuit also helps with this. It's been streamlined now, so you can pair certain abilities, like sprinting while cloaked, or leaping great distances while cloaked, or using armor to absorb fall damage. The Strength and Speed modes have been combined into a single Power, which has become kind of passive. Press A, and you jump. Hold it down, and you draw energy and do a Power jump. It makes the whole superhuman soldier thing much more fluid, and makes you capable of doing some badass combat parkour with ease. The first game, you were kind of limited in that you could cloak, run, super jump, or be armored. Now you can sprint, slide, power jump up a scaffolding, and armor yourself in half the time of the first game, and it makes you that much more lethal, capable, and the game entertaining. My only nitpick on the controls is I noticed some input lag like that found in KillZone 2. It's not nearly as bad as KZ2, but it's not as slick and fast as MW2. It only gets you into trouble during seriously outrageous firefights when it couples with the frame rate dropping.
The art and character design is also terrific. The New York terrain feels like a real city, even though you can't go everywhere. It's far more convincing a cityscape than the environment in Prototype, for example. The I Am Legend, post-destruction vistas are chilling and detailed. The human enemies, the CELL mercenaries, are pretty typical. The alien invaders, however, the Ceph, are freaking awesome this time. Last game, they were just weak floating ghost things or lame War of the Worlds style tripods. This time, there are a variety, but most are vicious looking bipedal exoskeletons that look and sound like demonic little brethren to the Decepticons in the live-action Transformers movies. They also share the same kinds of capabilities as your suit, so they can leap from building to building, kick over cars, and so forth. Combat against them can make you long for a mouse when they hop around you.
The story felt like a lot of stuff hit the cutting room floor (origins/purpose of the alien virus, for example, are implied but never stated), but Richard K. Morgan has done some cool stuff here. The Nanosuit, just a toy or tool in the first game, is almost a character in itself this time around, and linked intrinsically to the plot. Morgan deals a lot with post/trans-humanism in his novels, and you can see those themes come out here. Still, I would have liked more screen time for characters from the first game, and for more to show up at all (Psycho and Nomad are completely MIA). Overall, however, the plot makes a LOT more sense and is a lot less insulting than some more recent games (even there's a lot of stereotypical wannabe military dialogue).
Now, my gripes. First, the freaking AI. Just like in Crysis, if you're not cloaked, you apparently have a giant freaking arrow over your head because enemies see you instantly and without fail and at extreme distances. There were times I jumped behind cover cloaked, de-cloaked unseen, only to hear, "There he is!" and have gunfire kicked at me. There's another time where you knock out the power and the entire room is pitch black, yet apparently every single human has night vision because even though you can't see a damn thing, they can see you. It's exceedingly frustrating, and forces you to rely on the stealth aspects of the Nanosuit more than I like. Along that same note, you can take down a foe using a silenced weapon or the knife halfway across the map, and even though his comrades don't have eyes on, they suddenly know they have a man down and sound the alarm. It forces you to basically either go all stealth, or dig in a prepare for a serious firefight.
Also, there are numerous pathfinding bugs in the AI (they get stuck rather often). The combat AI isn't bad, and some of the enemies will put up MEAN fights. That said, it's not as ridiculous as Reach on Legendary, where you can pump three headshots into an Elite and he'll just turn around and slam you down with a single melee. Enemies in Crysis 2 still retain their respective weaknesses even on the higher difficulties, and a rocket is still a rocket (of the regular units you face, only the big, Hunter-like commander Ceph can take more than one direct hit and live to talk about it).
The sound effect and musical score are outstanding as well, but I noticed a lot of sound glitches and hiccups with regards to to stereo placement of NPC voices and conversations.
The checkpoint system is all right, though sometimes I wish they were more common. Also, the way each level ends/fades out is kind of abrupt and sometime buggy.
I know this has transformed into a total wall of text, but I wanted to dispel some serious rumors/fanboy BS and give the game an honest review. I enjoyed the hell out of the campaign. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of a brawny, jock sibling of Half-Life; not nearly as cerebral or respected, but with similar qualities and standout characteristics. The world of Crysis 2 just felt real, and more importantly, it still felt like Crysis. Weapon customization, new armor upgrades, and open-form combat are all back, just faster this time. Sneak and stealth your way through or rip the .50-cal off the jeep and gun them down... It's all up to you. This isn't a Dragon Age II, or even as chopped down as Mass Effect 2. It's still Crysis, the graphics are still impressive, and most importantly, as a game, it's damn well designed and proof that CryTek's designers are capable of more than just pretty engines.
Let me preface by saying I am a FPS junkie. Been one since long before FPS games became the dominant genre. I've played a lot of them, going back to more obscure titles like Bungie's pre-Halo masterpiece, Marathon, to classics like Half-Life, and lesser known ones like No One Lives Forever and Project IGI. I've sank countless hours into Quake III: Arena, Unreal Tournament, and Counter-Strike Beta (5.2-6.1). I'm not saying all of this to try and sound "cool," but more to convey that I'm not a ADHD fourteen-year-old spaz with COD fever. I'm also not a fanboy in any shape or form; I call it as I see it. I have two Xbox 360s, a PS3, and the PC listed below in my signature, which was built last April with the sole purpose of playing the original Crysis and Warhead, so I'm not new to the Nanosuit or any of the characters.
So let's get to it. I just finished the SP campaign on the Veteran difficulty level (which is third out of the four difficulties; Super Soldier is the hardest). It took me approximately 7 hours and 30 minutes, which was me moving at a moderate pace (not rushing, not inspecting every nook and cranny). I played it on the Xbox 360 as I'm no home in Germany with my PC right now, but had been anticipating this game for a while, and didn't feel like waiting another eight months.
Honestly, you can't ignore the graphics. As much as I tried, this game is freaking gorgeous. CryTek can pat themselves on the back, because the politics of "console port" and Direct X 9 vs DX11 aside, the game is flat out breathtaking. Even on 19" Panasonic Viera LCD TV with my Audio Technica noise-cancelling headphones, I was sucked into the world they created. Sure, the resolution on the 360 is clearly up-scaled (like most games), and the frame rate does drop during intense firefights. But it's never unplayable, and it's easily the most visually impressive title on the 360. The things that's most jaw-dropping about it is unlike a game like, say, KillZone 2, which is graphically impressive but is very dark, linear and almost a corridor shooter at times, or Halo: Reach, which is very open but features simple, spartan environments, Crysis 2 features these open, complex vistas, with gorgeous lighting and environmental effects. I remember being very impressed with the Frostbite engine in Bad Company 2 on the 360, but Crysis 2 outdoes even that.
Anyone that says Crysis 2 sold out and went Call of Duty hasn't played the campaign. I can't comment on MP because my internet isn't fast enough for me to get on XBL. But the SP is FAR from the heavily-scripted, narrow-path stuff of Black Ops or Modern Warfare. Honestly, I enjoyed the SP tremendously, and would even go so far as to rank it one of my favorite campaigns in recent memory.
Those nostalgic of the first will complain about the city in place of the tropical island, and how the island was more sandbox-like. This isn't really true, however. The island in the first game is more open, yes, but a lot of that is just empty terrain. The reality is that Crysis 1 always guided you towards an objective. The fact that you can't just run off a few kilometers in a random direction now is kind of a trivial loss because it didn't really add anything to the first game. If your objective was to take out a radar tower, regardless of how far you ran off on the beach, you still had to come back to that tower. And once you're in the tower base, all that empty space on the beach doesn't really matter. Are the levels in Crysis 2 smaller? Yes, but they're still HUGE by modern standards. Are they linear? NO. You can still approach every combat situation with your own style, and the urban design even adds verticality to the equation (a worthy addition I can't stress enough). Crysis was never meant to be a free roam, huge open world like Fallout or Oblivion. It's an action-shooter. With Crysis 2, they've simply cut some of the dead space between battlegrounds. The battlegrounds themselves are fantastic. The level design is truly top-notch, and unlike other games which ask you to replay them to hunt trophies or whatever (though this game has those two), the battlegrounds in Crysis 2 really make you want to replay each section and go, "Okay, so I snuck through the sewer that time. What if I had tried jumping the scaffolding instead?"
The Nanosuit also helps with this. It's been streamlined now, so you can pair certain abilities, like sprinting while cloaked, or leaping great distances while cloaked, or using armor to absorb fall damage. The Strength and Speed modes have been combined into a single Power, which has become kind of passive. Press A, and you jump. Hold it down, and you draw energy and do a Power jump. It makes the whole superhuman soldier thing much more fluid, and makes you capable of doing some badass combat parkour with ease. The first game, you were kind of limited in that you could cloak, run, super jump, or be armored. Now you can sprint, slide, power jump up a scaffolding, and armor yourself in half the time of the first game, and it makes you that much more lethal, capable, and the game entertaining. My only nitpick on the controls is I noticed some input lag like that found in KillZone 2. It's not nearly as bad as KZ2, but it's not as slick and fast as MW2. It only gets you into trouble during seriously outrageous firefights when it couples with the frame rate dropping.
The art and character design is also terrific. The New York terrain feels like a real city, even though you can't go everywhere. It's far more convincing a cityscape than the environment in Prototype, for example. The I Am Legend, post-destruction vistas are chilling and detailed. The human enemies, the CELL mercenaries, are pretty typical. The alien invaders, however, the Ceph, are freaking awesome this time. Last game, they were just weak floating ghost things or lame War of the Worlds style tripods. This time, there are a variety, but most are vicious looking bipedal exoskeletons that look and sound like demonic little brethren to the Decepticons in the live-action Transformers movies. They also share the same kinds of capabilities as your suit, so they can leap from building to building, kick over cars, and so forth. Combat against them can make you long for a mouse when they hop around you.
The story felt like a lot of stuff hit the cutting room floor (origins/purpose of the alien virus, for example, are implied but never stated), but Richard K. Morgan has done some cool stuff here. The Nanosuit, just a toy or tool in the first game, is almost a character in itself this time around, and linked intrinsically to the plot. Morgan deals a lot with post/trans-humanism in his novels, and you can see those themes come out here. Still, I would have liked more screen time for characters from the first game, and for more to show up at all (Psycho and Nomad are completely MIA). Overall, however, the plot makes a LOT more sense and is a lot less insulting than some more recent games (even there's a lot of stereotypical wannabe military dialogue).
Now, my gripes. First, the freaking AI. Just like in Crysis, if you're not cloaked, you apparently have a giant freaking arrow over your head because enemies see you instantly and without fail and at extreme distances. There were times I jumped behind cover cloaked, de-cloaked unseen, only to hear, "There he is!" and have gunfire kicked at me. There's another time where you knock out the power and the entire room is pitch black, yet apparently every single human has night vision because even though you can't see a damn thing, they can see you. It's exceedingly frustrating, and forces you to rely on the stealth aspects of the Nanosuit more than I like. Along that same note, you can take down a foe using a silenced weapon or the knife halfway across the map, and even though his comrades don't have eyes on, they suddenly know they have a man down and sound the alarm. It forces you to basically either go all stealth, or dig in a prepare for a serious firefight.
Also, there are numerous pathfinding bugs in the AI (they get stuck rather often). The combat AI isn't bad, and some of the enemies will put up MEAN fights. That said, it's not as ridiculous as Reach on Legendary, where you can pump three headshots into an Elite and he'll just turn around and slam you down with a single melee. Enemies in Crysis 2 still retain their respective weaknesses even on the higher difficulties, and a rocket is still a rocket (of the regular units you face, only the big, Hunter-like commander Ceph can take more than one direct hit and live to talk about it).
The sound effect and musical score are outstanding as well, but I noticed a lot of sound glitches and hiccups with regards to to stereo placement of NPC voices and conversations.
The checkpoint system is all right, though sometimes I wish they were more common. Also, the way each level ends/fades out is kind of abrupt and sometime buggy.
I know this has transformed into a total wall of text, but I wanted to dispel some serious rumors/fanboy BS and give the game an honest review. I enjoyed the hell out of the campaign. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of a brawny, jock sibling of Half-Life; not nearly as cerebral or respected, but with similar qualities and standout characteristics. The world of Crysis 2 just felt real, and more importantly, it still felt like Crysis. Weapon customization, new armor upgrades, and open-form combat are all back, just faster this time. Sneak and stealth your way through or rip the .50-cal off the jeep and gun them down... It's all up to you. This isn't a Dragon Age II, or even as chopped down as Mass Effect 2. It's still Crysis, the graphics are still impressive, and most importantly, as a game, it's damn well designed and proof that CryTek's designers are capable of more than just pretty engines.
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