Okay Geek Farm
Xbox 360 - Crysis 2 Review
Alex Tretrop
Crytek has prided itself on bringing the highest graphical quality to their games on the PC. While the original Crysis was utterly fantastic to look at, the story and overall structure of the campaign weren’t always on par with its visuals. However, Crytek’s release of Crysis 2, available on consoles as well as PC, is hoping to mesh those fantastic visuals with well polished gameplay to make a masterpiece of an FPS. Is that even possible?
Publisher: EA
Developer: Crytek
Platforms: PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Price: $59.99
Story
Crysis 2 takes place three years after the original and things haven’t really gotten much better in future New York. You play nameless protagonist Alcatraz en route to assist a special squad of soldiers. Things don’t go very well and after a few interesting opening moments, you are now the user of the Nanosuit, which, in almost every aspect of the game, is the true star of the show.
Unfortunately, the story itself doesn’t go anywhere whatsoever. It’s all a really big excuse for you to shoot soldiers and aliens in an apocalyptic style depiction of NYC. Same old, same old. The character’s you encounter range from flat out annoying to really flat out annoying, and the villan of the game is one of the most cookie-cutter types I’ve ever seen, even for a shooter. Put very, very simply, the story just plane sucks — and if you’re playing the game for this reason then you should feel bad.
Gameplay
Crysis 2’s greatest strength is its gameplay and again, it’s all because of the suit. Crysis is saved from being just another generic shooter by giving you some very cool tools to use and allowing you a large amount of freedom in an extremely linear game.
The nanosuit itself can, with the push of a button, change between three primary modes: Armor, Cloak, and Power. While you default to power, activating armor gives you a substantial health boost; cloak does exactly what you think — turning you invisible at the push of a button. Everything you do costs Energy, which is quickly replenished when not in use. While this is all well and dandy, Crysis excels at making the game fun and challenging, yet still making you feel like a super soldier. You can do all sorts of crazy tactics but because of the Energy mechanic, you’ll find yourself planning out the next group of enemies to maximize your suit’s effectiveness.
The best part however, is Crysis’ freedom of choice throughout its extremely linear first player experience. The game loves to throw you into an inconspicuous location, recommending you use your binoculars to mark targets as well as find ammo crates in the surronding area. How you get to those enemies or the extra ammo is up to you. Similar to something seen in Deus Ex, the game doesn’t hold your hand and tell you how to play it, rather it leaves that up to you. You can play it just like a straight up shooter, with the Armor mode providing extra protection when you know there’s a large group of enemies around the corner, or perhaps you’d like to take a more stealthy approach, deciding the best places to hide and recharge your energy as you silently take out all the enemies or if you can’t be bothered, skipping the whole encounter all together. While it isn’t as crazy as Deus Ex’s variety of choice, Crysis 2 really feels like a tightly packed experience, it’s easy to grasp and extremely fun to play with. And ultimately this makes each area interesting due the sheer amount of approaches you can take.
Another surprisingly great addition to the series is Multiplayer. It takes the already frentic gunplay and implements it into a surprisingly robust and fairly original suite of multiplayer options. Now with the full array of multiplayer modes you can really have a fun and crazy time with people around the world. A particular favorite of mine is a mode where one team gets nanosuits and pistols while the other is filled with regular ol’ soldiers that have the best gear, playing a game similar to Search and Destroy from Call of Duty. It’s filled with tons of tension and is a real blast to play.
But primarily you’ll be playing in the nanosuits for each mode and it takes that same Energy management tactic and brings it into the multiplayer environment, forcing you to think extremely quickly about how you’ll transition between armor, cloak and sprinting while leaving enough energy for a firefight. It’s tightly balanced, although there were some encounters that felt like it was almost random how many bullets they were take. Sometimes they took 3, other times they took 6, and it felt as if the game wasn’t always clear when the other player were transtioning into a different mode. Regardless, thanks to smart additions like the suit and other small touches, like the fact that you have to collect dogtags from the bodies of enemy players to earn your killstreaks, really make the multiplayer stand on its own as a fantastic addition to the game.
Finally, I do feel the need to mention that I did encounter a “game-breaking” bug that stopped me from progressing entirely in the Campaign, but after a few replays of that lengthy mission, I did finally get the proper scripting to occur, fixing the game. Just be aware that this game seems to have a pretty major flaw in it. I didn’t encounter any further problems after or before that.
Visuals and Sound
I don’t think I really need to state that the visuals in Crysis 2 are bar none some of the best ever seen. What really catches your attention, right within the first few moments, is the excellent use in lighting. You can see the light reflecting through the cracks in trees and the small openings of buildings. No detail was spared and I really commend Crytek for their work. The environnments themselves are super detailed, with you having a stupid large field of view and a crazy amount of detail in every map of the singleplayer and multiplayer offerings. While the FPS could use some serious work on the 360 (some character models look downright silly), it’s still no sloutch in the visuals department.
What it does lack however, is any sort of satisfying audio. Apart from the suit’s voice actor, who does a fairly good job at sounding… well, like a suit, nothing else is good for our ears. The characters all have generally poor voice actors, the guns don’t sound like they really pack enough of a punch, and the game loves to let two people talk at once. It’s all extremely irritating and none of it gets any better by the end of the game.
Overall
I really enjoyed the time I spent with Crysis 2. A surprisingly great Multiplayer will also ensure that you’ll be revisting the title a few times down the road. The same can be said for the visuals, with an unbelievably great lighting engine and ridiculous detail in the game’s various environments. While some elements of the game aren’t very good, Crysis 2 stands on it’s own as a fantastic title for any shooter fan.
Pro’s
- Polished gameplay and modes
- Awe-inspiring visuals
- Surprisngly entertaining multiplayer
Con’s
- Story is cookie-cutter
- Audio is lacking in voicing and sound
- Contains a “game-breaking” bug
8/10 - While the story and audio may as well have been non-exsistant, the gameplay is unbelieveably tight, with equal parts satisfying to play while giving you the freedom to approach each encounter in a variety of different ways. The game loves to develop this concept as its progesses, and I really applaud Crytek for such a fantastic effort.
