Is Cryteks new found console love a Crysis for PC gamers?
There are some very clear differences between Crysis and its sequel, the most obvious being the setting scope of the levels. Crysis 1 gave you giant wide open levels on a beautiful jungle island with tons of space to explore, Crysis 2 is a bit more contained, taking places in the streets of a dilapidated New York City. Whether this is detrimental or not will solely come down to personal preference however. I personally liked the more varied options that the first game offered, but I can understand that a lot of people felt that it lacked direction, which the sequel definitely has.
Whereas Crysis's levels were large sandboxes, Crysis 2's levels are made up of linear sections that lead into smaller sandbox areas. This ends up working very well, and the new additions to the Binoculars allow you to see the strategic locations chosen by the developers which helps a lot in the earlier levels when you are first finding your feet with the suits powers. This functionality ends up being pretty useless in the later levels however, when the strategic recommendations are reduced to "There's a turret there" and "You might want this gun" rather than showing you the best way to attempt a Stealth attack, or avoid enemies altogether. And then after you make it through these large open areas, you get pulled through a corridor, or a narrow street, or a tunnel or something similar, and this is where a large amount of the plot development happens. But more on the plot later.
The main hook of the game is of course the Nanosuit, a semi-organic suit that your character wears which allows him to switch between various powers. Stealth, Power, Armour and Speed. These have been streamlined, allowing you to switch between Armour and Stealth with the Q and E keys (you can also switch between them with the middle mouse button like if the first game if you like) and then Power and Speed have been made purely contextual. Speed will now only activate when you are sprinting, and Power activates in a few different circumstances, for example you can hold a key while aiming down the sights to steady your aim using Power mode, or you can hold down the melee attack key to do a stronger, energy draining melee attack. It's a vast improvement over the first game, and a welcome one.
The levels themselves however don't really feel like they were designed with the suit in mind at times. Often Stealth is useless as there are enemies clogging up a chokepoint. And this brings me to my next point. The AI is often awful.
I know I shouldn't continually compare a game to another game during a review, but this comparison needs to be made. The AI in the first Crysis was mostly fantastic. It had some bugs here and there, but enemies would generally act like a squad, investigate missing allies, investigate noises, etc etc. They were incredibly smart for the most part and it opened up a range of other strategies. Where you could mess with the AI, manipulate it to do something that would make your task easier. None of that is in Crysis 2. This feels like it is most likely a direct result of the console development, as the AI in the game flat out sucks. If you use a silenced weapon to shoot an explosive barrel, enemies will suddenly know where you are and run towards you and shoot at you. Whereas in the original game, they would panic, a couple of guys would investigate the barrel, and others would look around for what caused it to explode. They would ONLY find you during this investigation, they wouldn't magically go "HE'S OVER THERE!" It's not gamebreaking an any way, but it's disappointing. There are also plenty of AI bugs where enemies brains seem to not switch on at the right time, causing them to sit staring at you for a few moments/forever. It's not all bad though, I know I'm seeming very critical about the AI, but the aliens have truly impressive AI. They know how to scale the environment, they can climb pretty much anything that you can, and find the best positions to flank you.
The actual guns you use are all the usual fare. A couple of assault rifles, a couple of sniper rifles, etc etc. The types of guns on show are nothing special, but the sound effects for most of them are great, and the guns feel very weighted and powerful like in a game like Killzone 3, while still being very responsive. There's no Alien gun that shoots crazy ice shards, or nuke gun this time around but there is a microwave gun which causes enemy heads to explode. And that's pretty cool.
Crysis 2 is of course a sequel to Crysis 1 which ended on a big cliffhanger. But don't worry if you haven't played the first game, Crysis 2 has almost nothing to do with them. Only one character returns from the first game, nothing is ever explained about what happened to the other two survivors, the cliffhanger ending is never ended, and at every step it proceeds to retcon events from the first game ("Can there be any doubt that these creatures evolved in an ocean?" Yeah, here's a doubt for you. In the first game THEY FROZE EVERYTHING.) This is probably due to Crytek actually hiring a fully fledged author to write their plot for them this time, he most likely looked at the story for the first game and went "Well, you really only put this here to show off your ice tech, and this here to show there'd be a sequel, right? Yeah, lets just scrap that." And while it saddens me that Nomad's story isn't being continued, I also understand why they went this route instead. The story in this game is far superior to that of the first game. Hell, it's better than most FPSes these days, with political struggles internally with a PMC, then also between that PMC and the government's soldiers, and of course the struggles between everyone and the alien invaders. It is handled very well and you see the balance of power in areas shift very often and very drastically. The main focus of the story is that your character, Alcatraz, is a Military grunt who is part of a failed attempt to break into the alien warzone of New York and evacuate people. Everything goes pear-shaped and you end up with a nanosuit. After that you follow various people's instructions to fight the Alien and PMC threats. The plot has a few twists and turns here about the nature of the nanosuit, and Alcatraz, and even about what Prophet, the Nanosuit squad's leader in the first game was up to after leaving the island.
One of the things that really makes the story work thought is the graphics. The graphics add a lot of atmosphere and it often feels like you are in a ruined city that is still constantly in battle. It also helps that Crytek continue to push the boundaries of what graphics can look like in their new engine, adding a lot of visual flare to everything. The only issues being there are no DX11 features (or even DX10) and the world is nowhere near as interactive as the first game. You can't shoot trees down anymore (not that there are many trees) there are hardly any interactive objects, no wildlife to pick up and throw at enemies, you can't throw people through walls anymore. It's not a major detriment, but the destructiveness of the first game was one of my personally favourite parts of it. Overall it looks gorgeous though, with brilliant lighting and set pieces.
Finally we get to Multiplayer. Crytek have never really been good at Multiplayer, Far Cry, Crysis, Crysis Wars. They all got incrementally better but they still all seemed to be lacking. So it was a happy occasion for Crytek fans when they bought up Free Radical (creators of some of the best multiplayer games of all time, Timesplitters) and set them to work making the multiplayer component of Crysis 2. And they definitely pulled it off. The final result feels like a cross between Halo and Call of Duty, using the perk and unlock system that CoD is so well known for (after IW lifted it out of Battlefield) and the way everyone can take a lot of damage, jump around like a lunatic and go invisible is very reminiscent of Halo. The modes are the standard lot, Deathmatch,
Team Deathmatch, Capture the flag, etc. one of the modes that is pretty unique though is Assault mode, where one team starts with nanosuits but only have pistols and the other team has no nanosuit but has assault rifles and machine guns and the such. The non-nanosuit team is tasked with stopping the suits from capturing various points on the map, the result is that either the non-suits steam roll the nanosuits, or the nanosuits systematically pick off the defenders one by one using their powers to their advantage, be it by stealth killing stragglers, using a ground pounding attack to crush someone from above or even some of the nanosuits causing a big firefight with the defenders while the rest stealth their way to the control points to try and gain as many points as possible. It's a very fun mode when you get a good balance of teams, but i've found that pretty hard so far.
Overall Crysis 2 is a very complete package, the single player is a good length, with a surprisingly good story and some of the best graphics around. The multiplayer is also very good and worth sinking at least a few hours into. However, don't go into this game expecting a direct sequel to the original Crysis that continues the story of the original because you will be very disappointed.