Oh my...a good sequel?!
Why does everyone get so stoked about the first Crysis? It's nothing special or unique save for the fact that it was released as a high-profile PC exclusive during a time where that was and still is almost non-existent and PC gaming is a slowly dying breed. Aside of that, it's nothing to write home about and downright poor in many respects, mainly due to how it was marketed. We were told that Crysis was a completely non-linear game where you could anywhere on the island at any given time and complete any objective in any order you wished (Kind of like Far Cry 2 but that actually turned out to be true) and that even if you only did the absolute minimum, you could still complete the game no matter what. It was billed as "A different kind of FPS."
What we got instead was a super linear game hiding behind a non-linear mask, a mask which was easily removed not one level into the game. Sure the levels looked open and expansive but most of it was just eye candy. In fact, the game was so linear that the path to get through every level was laid out right before you. Yeah there were secondary objectives but you didn't even need to complete them. If anything, they were more a waste of time that a valuable asset to assist you. But hell, you could go in guns blazing or play is stealthy! That's awesome…and just like Deus Ex which was released more than half a decade before which also included the options to hack and/or talk your way through and use them all in any combination you desired with true non-linear level design.
The only things this game had going for it were the interesting premise of an alien invasion and its visuals which looked nowhere near as good as the previews. Yet every PC gamer views Crysis as the second coming of god himself and treats every copy as if it's Jesus Christ reincarnated in a disk. The only reason for this is that (as stated above) it was a mainstream game released as a PC exclusive during a time where that was and still is almost non-existent and PC gaming is a slowly dying breed. Now I too would be grateful if I got a high-profile release on my platform of choice if it was dying but I wouldn't glorify it to the extent that every PC head is.
No, I'm not saying Crysis is a bad game (despite what many of you may now have stuck in your minds at this point) but it's greatly flawed and suffers from an extreme identity crisis. It does have its good points but the execution is flawed enough to detract from the enjoyment considerably.
Enter Crysis 2; the sequel that made headlines when Crytek announced they were releasing it on consoles as well as the PC. Fan-tards cried out in agony and outrage as if their sacred church had been irredeemably defiled and dishonored and acted as if the anti-Christ had just made his way to earth. After three years of speculation, rumor and a massive war that wedged a six foot hole in the internet, how is Crysis 2?
In short: Pretty darn good
I'll say this just to get it out of the way: The story flat-out sucks. It completely ditches the original game's story and characters save for a brief appearance of Prophet in the beginning and instead focuses on a silent marine grunt who somehow gets the nanosuit (I won't spoil it) and then all of a sudden he becomes humanity's last hope. The game offers no real explanation of the events that happened in between the two games or what happened to any of the characters or the sudden change of costumes for the aliens either. Little references are made here and there but for the most part, it feels like a reboot in many respects, almost to cater to the new group of console goers. What the story does offer however is yet again, another dumb, cliché tale of the whole one-man army saves earth with super suit and blah blah blah. Stupid and nothing that anyone who's even remotely into sci-fi hasn't seen before.
That out of the way, let's move on to the good. The first aspect that has been fixed and probably the most important is the identity crisis that the first game suffered. Crysis has finally found out what it wants to be. This is done by removing all false promises and assumptions of non-linearity and focusing on delivering a fun action game instead. The game's levels are linear but offer multiple branching paths to get through each scenario. It even goes as far as to highlight "tactical options" every time you come across such a setup. Not to mention there's also a tactical visor mode now which lets you highlight anything of interest, be it enemy positions, weapons, ammo pick-ups, etc. This effectively takes what Crytek was trying to achieve with the first game and make more sense with it rather than crafting a linear game, throwing a lame random secondary objective which didn't connect with the rest of the level, then saying there were two whole ways to play the game and calling it "non-linear."
So what is Crysis 2? It's an action game, simple as that. You go through the level, take out anything in your way and choose how you want to do so and Crytek gives plenty of options for that. There's a decent selection of guns all of which can be customized and the nanosuit powers make a return, all greatly improved from the first game. The game is pretty much your standard modern war FPS with some vehicle sequences and aliens but the suit is what makes the game stand out from being so. Offering four powers consisting of speed, strength, armor and stealth, the game provides plenty of incentives to play otherwise and even throws in plenty of objects, setups, etc to vary the gameplay further. Want to kick a car and crush an enemy soldier? You can. Feel like speeding by a blockade because you don't want to fight your way though? It's risky but you can. Pretty much the same as the first game but the powers are much more balanced and fleshed out this time in terms of functionality, usage and energy consumption.
As far as PS3 controls go, all the powers are seamlessly integrated into the control scheme. You can utilize strength by either holding down the jump button or the right analog stick to charge up a powered up jump/melee attack and the game tells you when you can make use of this. Simply hold down the left analog stick when running to trigger the speed function. Armor and stealth are mapped to the L2 and R2 buttons. Functions are swapped on the Xbox 360 version.
Crysis 2 even adds a few RPG elements to the mix. At some point in the game, your character collects a tissue sample of the aliens and is somehow able to upgrade the suit using more tissue samples afterwards. The upgrades range from simply reducing the energy consumption rate of a certain power to cloaking and de-cloaking faster to adding a few new moves to your hand to hand combat arsenal. The cool thing about this though is that you can turn the upgrades on and off if you want to use a different one. You can have up to four upgrades active at a time (one for each power) but you have to "buy" them first before you can use them.
I could go on but it's really best that you play the game to find out for yourself. Still, the main strength of Crysis 2 comes from putting players on a straight path and giving them the tools and options to deal with each encounter however they so wish, as well as balancing out the nanosuit powers and giving some of the less utilized powers of the previous game more usefulness. This allows Crytek to give players the ability to make the game their own while still allowing themselves to tell their own story. It's a huge improvement and makes for a very satisfying and fun game.
My views are not completely positive however. I do have some quirks. For one, the AI is a little stupid. I once had an encounter right at the beginning no less where two enemies spotted me. I killed one of them and then his partner went right back to his routine patrol as if nothing ever happened despite the fact that I was within spitting distance of him. The AI has always been like this in Crytek's games. Thankfully it's not nearly as bad here but I personally found that incident quite laughable. Secondly, the alien art design, aside of being a complete "WTF?!" is very lacking. There's only about four enemy types grand total and the only real way to tell the difference is by their physical size. There are some enemy vehicles but they're not really anything special. There are also no bosses to speak of and the last enemy encounter is a group of four black and silver textured standard enemies with super health, yet they can all be killed through your one-hit kill sneak attack melee function.
The last thing that made me scratch my head in confusion was the weapon customization system. Say you find a SCAR with standard iron sights. You can add a laser or a red-dot scope but not an assault scope? You have to find a SCAR with an assault scope in order to use it and then you're locked out of the attachments you could use on the other SCAR? This is a downgrade from the first game. In the first game, you had to find weapons with certain attachments if you wanted to use them but you could then attach said peripheral to any gun of that class (i.e. SCAR and AK, etc) This makes absolutely no sense. You also can't throw grenades freely anymore. You have to manually select them using the special weapon menu controlled by the D-pad. Again, makes no sense but probably done due to lack of buttons for the function.
Now to wrap up the last few loose ends…
Audio/Visual presentation: Not going there. It'll only start some stupid debate. All you need to know is that it looks great and that it's one of the best looking games out there across all platforms. The music too is great.
Multiplayer: It's Call of Duty 4 with nanosuits. You figure it out, MP ain't one of my interests.
I'm probably missing several pieces of the puzzle here but in short: Having been a born and bred PC gamer during the Clinton years, I've played every PC shooter out there almost. I don't care for the first Crysis but I love the second one and I wholly recommend it, especially to those who have not been able to play a Crysis game before and are wondering what all the fuss is about.