Crysis 2

Crysis 2 had big shoes to fill. The first Crysis was fun and expansive with gameplay that lived up to the promise of providing strategic options through the unique nano-suit mechanic. All this was wrapped up in what were some ground breaking and memorable graphical settings. Crysis 2 comes off with all the same elements still in good form, but their impressions have been unfortunately muted.

Admittedly the graphics are what drove me to the game, and although they still are some of the best around they fall flat in the expectations set by the games predecessor. The streets of New York have never looked as good in the game and the game is dotted with notable landmarks and a good variety of settings. However the pretty world feels too stiff. Part of the wonder of the first game was watching the world fall apart at the hands of your destruction: buildings would collapse, trees would splinter and fall and the unexpected would take place in a very living and dynamic world. Although lots of things will blow up in the streets of New York leaving minor concrete damage, with the exception of some scripted events, large scale or gameplay effecting destruction is disappointingly absent. The graphics themselves are improved in some respects, namely the realism of the lighting and shading (at least on the PC), but the game also over applies many post processing effects which while sometimes interesting also seem to dispense with some of the sharp and detailed realism lauded in first game. Many people have complained that the existence of console versions necessarily watered down or ruined the splendour of the graphics, and although the arguments aren’t without some minor ground I feel they are greatly exaggerated. The game looks good and unlike the first it also run butter smooth at high resolution and ‘extreme’ details on my mid to high end PC.

The gameplay, much like the graphics, is still a top tier experience, but takes a small step back instead of a step forward. All the nanosuit powers are still here and there is a very real sense that any given situation can be approached differently depending on the mechanics exercised. The application of the suit powers has been streamlined in a positive way and it’s even easier to switch between powers. However, the stealth mechanic received a noticeable buff including a takedown mode, which really slants the game towards its use. In the previous game there was quite a lot of satisfaction in performing a stealth takedown because it was rather difficult to do, with many enemies quickly seeing you break stealth and rarely providing opportunities to re-stealth. This isn’t the case in Crysis 2 and the positioning of the enemies lets you effortlessly perform stealth takedown after takedown going completely unseen. Sometimes I found myself finding it so mindlessly boring that I would intentionally break stealth and start running in guns blazing just to liven up the gameplay. I’d prefer to return to where the game was forcing that change in tactics on me instead of me forcing it on the game.

Crysis 2 handholds the player by providing “tactical options” at many points showing routes, items, and strategies to employ. I found this feature a completely destroyed the satisfaction in figuring the strategy out on my own and what previously would have been a sense of joy from executing a self-created battle plan felt like choosing one of many given rails to ride. The sense that I was mapping such tactics on to a natural living world was shattered by the constant reminder that the levels were explicitly designed with set paths in mind. The tactical telegraphing combined with the overly easy stealth takedowns really muddle my experience sometimes causing me to simply stealth by entire regions of the game as opposed to playing them just to move the story forward. In essence the gameplay is a lot of fun and has the potential for creativity not found in most shooters, but is somewhat spoiled by obsessive hand holding and decreased difficulty.

The story and the atmosphere weren’t cheesy or poorly done, but were also slightly forgettable. Although I found the story worth watching I wasn’t clinging to the edge of my chair to see how it ended, nor did I find myself really caring about the fate of any of the characters. The story did seem to do good job of building a Crysis universe and multi-game story arch going so far to explain some of the events of the first game better the first Crysis did. However, doing so comes at the expense of jumping back and forth in time and relying on a presumption that the player was familiar with the first game, something that console players won’t be. In regards to atmosphere I generally found the game lacking moments of fear or tension that seem to be the hallmark of a game that sticks with me. The music, with the exception of the annoying menu music, went mainly unnoticed. There was however a good use of sound with the pings of bullets and the distant firing of guns being really well executed. My greatest disappointment was the complete lack of those moments in games where you turn the corner to see some new sight: a vista, a structure, some form of aesthetic showpiece that stops you in your tracks just to look around and take it all in. This is especially disappointing for me as someone who is so very fond of New York City and imagined it ripe for such moments.

Multiplayer is the standard rank up affair for FPS these days, but with the added mechanic of the suit. The suit surprised me in how well it translated to multiplayer, even having spent hours playing the first iteration online. Mechanics that usually fail to work in the multiplayer domain, notably stealth, actually work surprisingly well being useful enough to sneak up on another player, while not feeling overpowered. The one gripe I have about multiplayer is how quickly you can die. Sometimes it felt like guns blazing towards an opponent it was simply a coin toss that would decide the victor and little skill based application would aid survival since it only takes a couple rounds to take a player down. Hopefully this will get balanced in the near future to keep an otherwise great experience from feeling to luck based.

Finally it’s worth mentioning that the multiplayer launch for me was frustrating with servers not working, numerous troubles getting limited edition codes to work, and a really confusing website/in-game login system that sputtered out of the gate. This by no means effected my enjoyment of the single player campaign but the MP side seemed lacking a surprising amount of polish given the long beta the game went through. My limited edition items, which the myCrysis site says I’ve claimed, seemed to have been lost in the either never to be applied to my profile.

Overall Crysis 2 is a fun play-through, but under the weight of expectations set by the legacy of its predecessor it falls short. The core elements of the gameplay could have maintained a bit more punch with less hand holding and tweaked difficulty, two things I can’t imagine being difficult to revise. With that in mind I still find myself interested to see what the series does next.