Crysis 2 Review

Crysis 2 has big boots to fill, lets not beat around the bush. The original set the standard for what defines a next generation shooter, featuring jaw dropping physics, incredible visuals and a monstrous foe. Crysis 2’s job was not only to replicate this in the urban environment of New York, but to branch this experience across multiple platforms (this review was conducted on a PC.) Unfortunately, the series has come two steps forward, and many giant leaps back.

You are Alcatraz, a marine given a nanosuit by one of the previous game’s characters – Prophet. Alien infection has spread throughout New York and your job is to battle through various famous locations to assist your allies whilst your suit manufactures a cure to the disease. The main criticism of Crysis was that the storyline was slightly cliché, and Crytek left with promises to do better next time. What they have come back with is a story even more cliché than the last, but heaped on top of this a whole variety of revelations about the suit that simply make you go ‘….what? You can’t be serious.’

One of the key elements last time around was how the aliens were presented. Almost like a horror game, they were briefly flittered in front of you for long periods - even by the end in all out war they were still hidden behind their machines, mysterious and unknowable. You were at the forefront of human discovery, the unforgettable segment inside the alien ship made you genuinely feel like a privileged human being, the only man to ever set eyes upon this magical place. This game, with no fanfare, reveals the aliens to you with almost zero preamble and simply says ‘kill’. A game and it’s sequel’s incredible build up torn up in one moment. It feels like any other futuristic, generic FPS where you wander the streets pummelling aliens with no thought behind it.

Visually, the game is still one of the best around, but only in terms of backdrop. The graphics, while remaining high end, have been cut back rather a lot as this article illustrates rather well (http://uk.gamespot.com/features/6307286/index.html). Want to customize the graphics on your PC? Well too bad, you can only choose between low, medium or high. Upon entering New York in real life, the first thing you are confronted with is the sheer sense of scale, something the free roaming nature of the first Crysis also gave. Now, confined to linear levels where piles of rubble conveniently block every street it feels claustrophobic at points – you are a superman but your powers are completely limited to what you are ordered to do.

The game can still look great but just cannot compare to it's forefather.

 This brings me to the most important aspect, the gameplay. The way the nanosuit works has been changed considerably, and it needed it, with the radial menu not cutting it before. All abilities (stealth, strength, speed and armour) now use the same energy bar. The fact that all abilities use energy now means that any combination of nanosuit abilities is very difficult, leading to a very bi-polar nature of gameplay where you either stealthily assassinate everyone, or just wipe everyone out in a firefight using armour. Super speed is now almost the equivalent of a standard FPS sprint, which doesn’t feel very superhuman at all. A lot worse is the strength, which has been replaced by a token ability to kick or throw objects a small distance. Rather than running around a large map creatively using your abilities, occasionally throwing a chicken as if from Thor himself so it blows a hole through a helicopter, now you can just poke a table simply because of a button prompt message. This ties in with the physics as a whole, which are very notably absent. The amazing world of fully destructible scenery and often hilariously interactive creatures has been replaced by one where the buildings are invincible and the civilians in the streets cannot be interacted with at all (ie, bullets and yourself can pass straight through them.)  

As previously mentioned, there are two effective ways to complete any level – stealth or simply fight. The stealth aspect here is simply ridiculous when combined with the AI. You have the ability to instantly kill any standard opponent whilst stealthed if you are behind them. The human foes seem alright, but the aliens will frequently just stand in a completely stationary circle while you slowly pick them all off, or get stuck on walls. More than once a solitary human guard was left standing in a pile of his comrades’ corpses, with me having just disappeared right in front of him, who would then cheerfully exclaim ‘threat cleared.’ I started off shooting the guards from stealth. Then it moved on the slowly using the close combat stealth kill to destroy entire maps of enemies. Eventually this proved so tedious that bypassing the level simply by stealthing and walking past everyone became a viable alternative. Towards the end of the game, there is an objective to destroy that you must interact with from close range, surrounded by hordes and hordes of aliens. I stealthed past them, then simply uncloaked and destroyed it not two feet behind their backs. I then happily skipped back past them, with them of course having no idea that this had happened. This was simply a test, as the cunning Korean soldiers last time out would ruthlessly hunt you down with the intelligence of Skynet, but instead you are confronted with aliens who are anything but a master race of space farers. One interesting new aspect is the ability to upgrade your suit by collecting resources from the fallen bodies of aliens. This is a good move, although the upgrades aren’t quite balanced properly, being either near useless or hideously overpowered (for example the stealth upgrade, which makes your stealth seems to last forever, and helps promote the behaviour described above.)

Perhaps there would be more encouragement to play the game properly if the enemies were more interesting. If you discount bosses (of which there are effectively two) there are only 5 types of distinct enemy in the entire game. One of these is a unit you only see in literally the final moments, and one is simply a slightly tougher version of the standard alien that looks near identical. At first this is all fine, but after wave upon wave of the same opponents, it just becomes a chore. Special mention has to go to the last level, which has got to be one of the most disappointing final fights I have ever played. The game feels as if it starts off fairly well, but gets progressively worse until it is crowned by this segment. The guns fair a bit better, the microwave gun and a rocket launcher that files clusters of small missiles called a ‘Swarmer’ are particular highlights. A major improvement has been made regarding an aspect of gunplay, namely headshotting. The Korean soldiers previously seemed to have remarkably tough noggins, whereas this time a headshot will drop many foes at the first time of asking - it needed this change. The cover system has also been implemented very well, with none of that ‘I am now physically stuck to the wall’ business that so often ruins games that use it. It is just a shame minor improvements like these are so vastly overshadowed.

This is like re-living the Cloverfield monster's sneak attack all over again.

 The game also boasts a significantly revamped multiplayer, something introduced in Crysis: Warhead, the expansion. In this iteration it was most comparable to the Battlefield franchise, but this time around it is Call of Duty. It’s not like Call of Duty, it IS Call of Duty, except you can go invisible. Perks? Check. Killstreak bonuses? Check. 16 player lobbies even on the PC? Check. Ranks and unlockable weapons? Check. The list is endless, but suffice to say the difference between the games is minimal indeed. If you like Call of Duty there is no reason to not like the multiplayer, but such a blatantly obvious attempt at replicating something leaves a very sour taste on the tongue.

The word it boils down to is fun. Crysis 1 offered a million and one things and ways of doing things. It stringed this along with a flawed but believable storyline and exciting race of aliens so advanced you genuinely felt mystified by them. Now we have linear levels, no more interesting physics, two ways of killing everyone that are both executing in remarkably boring ways considering how awesome superhuman armour is, aliens that are so intelligent they can’t figure out what a wall is or why all their friends are dead, and a storyline where you are bossed about by your suit and confronted with being told things about the suit that stretch your imagination beyond breaking point. It is very clear a lot of these sacrifices, particularly the level layout, are done so that it can actually be run on consoles. The first game was targeted not just solely at PCs, but high end PCs, and it was inevitable many things would have to be taken out. Ultimately, this makes the game an incredible disappointment if you have played the first. It may sell more, but it is literally inferior in every way, and not even by small amounts, it is not the same game in the slightest. Crysis 2 feels like a bog standard, but very pretty FPS, and even a fairly good one at that. There is no reason, if you haven’t played the original, that you won’t get at least some enjoyment out of this game. However, Crysis 1 was nothing like a standard FPS, it transcended this by adding features no-one had seen before, features that are all now gone. Minor improvements have been made, but this swiftly fade into meaninglessness when confronted with the massive core gameplay aspects that have vanished. So far it is the game that has best embodied an increasingly evocative message – multiplatforming just does not work.

Score: 7/10