I gave starting Skyrim over with a new character a go, but I just couldn't get into doing the same mainline quests all over again. It was an awesome run, but time to put it up on the shelf.

So, on to Crysis 2. Best Buy has been doing some pretty nice sales leading up the holidays, which have mostly been selling out in a heart beat... But Crysis 2 is one I managed to jump on before the sell out.

Didn't have terribly high expectations for the game, but I really enjoyed it. It's short, and frankly I would have felt like it doesn't have enough bang for the buck at full price, but at $10 I like it quite a bit. Played through it initially on Easy difficulty, which was fun and generally not terribly challenging. Now replaying on Supersoldier (top difficulty) for the draw of some additional achievements and to see how far I can get. I'm currently a little over halfway through, but I know there are some pretty stacked battles in the later chapters.

You build up your dude throughout the game and all of those enhancements carry over to a new play. So, I imagine the initial chapters are much easier as they are geared towards a guy with very limited power ups. I'm just starting to get into later chapters. *gulp*

The main hook of the game is a cloak mode and an armor mode which you can switch to almost instantly. They drain energy which replenishes when you are in 'normal' mode (i.e. not cloaked or armored up or sprinting or jumping.) Each mode is pretty self explanatory. In my second play through I'm going the stealthy route quite often - safer with the beefed up enemies. I've had a few portions where I've methodically cleaned out most enemies only to have one of the final stragglers cut me down. At that point I usually switch to full cloak and just run past everything. Works sometimes, other times not so much.