|
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Crytek
Genre: FPS
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now
An enemy sees you and begins firing a gun at you. Quickly you make your armor stronger at will. The bullets do minimal damage and you take cover. Why not make yourself invisible, sneak behind your enemy and snap his neck? This is all thanks to the Nanosuit, a piece of high-tech equipment you have attached to your body. You don’t have to worry if your PC can run this game to experience gameplay like this. Crysis 2 from EA is the sequel to the PC game that made computers cry, but this time it’s available for all platforms.
A virus has spread through New York City. The city has been placed under martial law, and those who are not infected are evacuated. You play as a marine nicknamed Alcatraz on a search-and-rescue mission for a scientist named Dr. Nathan Gould, who is somewhere in the city. Before the mission has barely begun, your submarine is attacked and all hell breaks loose. Aliens known as the Ceph are attacking the city. You survive the attack and are rescued by a man named Prophet, who’s wearing a state-of-the-art Nanosuit. You wake up from your near-death state and are wearing the Nanosuit that he was wearing. You’re told that you alone can stop the events that are happening to the city. Your first task is to seek out Dr. Gould, because he’s the only one who can help you.
 In the campaign, your Nanosuit gives you the advantage against your enemies. You can easily navigate the three-dimensional New York City environment by sprinting, jumping, and grabbing ledges with ease. Your visor can enhance your vision to scan the surrounding area or increase your awareness. These actions all use suit energy, which gradually refills itself, and each suit mode you use consumes energy as well. Your suit has three modes to help you complete your missions. Weapon mode is your default and drains energy only when you use enhanced movement actions. Armor mode enhances your ability to take more damage, but at the cost of slower movement. Cloak mode makes you invisible to enemies unless you fire any weapon. You can purchase suit enhancements that offer improvements for each mode. Every time you kill a Ceph you get points that you can use to purchase the enhancements; the tougher the alien, the more points you get. Weapons that you use are also customizable. You can switch scopes or use alternate fire modes that are critical in the situations you face. Along with the campaign, Crysis 2 comes with a multiplayer mode that features plenty of game types. These include standard shooter modes such as deathmatch and capture the flag; all players have a Nanosuit at their disposal. Each match in multiplayer yields experience, depending on the game type, which can be used to unlock new weapons, equipment and abilities.
I am extremely impressed with this game. The first thing I notice is how beautiful it looks, even on a console. In addition, Crysis 2’s controls and gameplay are just as fantastic. There is a perfect friendship between the Nanosuit’s powers and the guns you use. The campaign, even though it starts off slowly, ends with the right amount of heart-pounding action; truly a great experience. I also had fun with the multiplayer. It’s just a blast because it takes great things from Halo and Call of Duty and puts them into one game.
 The campaign in Crysis 2 is a perfectly crafted experience. Its great battle sequences and your suit powers mix to create something that gamers will talk about for awhile. The only problem with it is the story. The game doesn’t do a good enough job of catching you up with the events that happened before the action starts. Don’t get me wrong, I think the story is excellent. But the lack of context makes you feel like you’ve missed a lot of things that can help explain the plot a bit more. Enemy AI is sometimes non-existent, making your foes easy to kill. And the multiplayer package takes great things from other shooters, but doesn’t reach their same level and falls a bit short.
Crysis 2 is a great shooter and is one of the best looking games on the console. The campaign gameplay is good because of the powers your Nanosuit gives you. The story gets confusing at times, but this shouldn’t deter you from checking it out. The multiplayer is fun, but is not at the same level as the better-known shooters already available. This game is for all shooter fans, and is 100-percent worth your money.
Our Score: 
Our Recommendation: 
|
Crysis 1 runs perfectly on my Alienware m11x. Its a MYTH that one needed a high end PC to play it.
Great review Watts!
The PC version had suffered greatly because of dumbing it down for consoles. It is truly sad to see a powerful PC franchise to fall from grace and join the hoi polloi. Oh well.
As one that played it on a PC I can attest to the veracity of Alaric’s statement. The game definitely feels like a console port.
Yes as a PC player I can say that this is Not even remotely close to Crysis 1s gameplay sense of scale, or innovation etc etc etc.
Crytek is now a Console developer and while they have lost me as a customer , I still wish them well .
I assume they make more money on the console that is why they went that way.
It’s ok Patrick, not everyone understand the greatness of Congo and console gaming. Stay strong, be firm, use thumbsticks.
Congo? As in République Démocratique du Congo? Hmm… you are right. I, for one, am having tremendous difficulty understanding its greatness…
Under-appreciated and ahead of its time: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112715/
Say no to drugs.
“Buy it” – are you kidding me? Patrick I’ll give you props for a decent review only because I did not play this garbage on a console, but regardless this should have been a “Skip it.” On a PC with no DX11 support the graphics were certainly nothing to gawk at. In fact I see far better effects; blooms, explosions, material destruction, shot deflection, etc., from Dice’s Battlefield Bad Company 2, which in my opinion even a year later still sets the bar for all FPS. Think that’s bad for Cyrsis 2 and MW, wait until later this year when BF 3 is released.
Getting back to Crysis 2, easily the worst FPS I played in years. Graphic quality aside the game play is atrocious – corny and most times annoying cut scenes, linear gameplay, a suit (nanosuit) that can kick a 5000 pound vehicle across a roadway but can’t kick down a door (comedy!!!), and non-player character (NPC) issues were enough to sink this ship for me; bumping/grinding each other, shooting each other, walking on air, twisting violently after dying while stuck inside a wall, peaking through walls while doing the Michael Jackson moon walk, yelling “All Clear” or “No contacts” after I just headshot another NPC standing a foot away and on and on. And that is just the ‘human’ NPC’s. While the alien NPC’s appeared a step up AI-wise they were also prone to some hilarious bloopers not worth mentioning since I already pointed out how bad the game is. No DX11 support is another sign this game was not ready for the future.
With all the hype and the time since Crysis one would think the developers could put out a polished and stunning FPS. I don’t think any number of patches will allow this game to recover, ever.
Conclusion for PC: purchase at your own risk a year from now when this game is in the bargain bin for $9.99.
Specs: Windows 7 64bit, AMD Phenom 64, 6gb RAM, Radeon 4600, 10k RPM 500gb Raptor.
I would have to Agree more with the Try it before you buy it For PC users. But looking at it as a Flat out 360 game (this IS a 360 review after all) there are some decent features.
The tiny maps Still seem like they would stick out to anyone familiar with the genre but for the Console crowd first and formost I would think graphics are the reason they are interested in this game .
Crysis was a PC game with a brand built on the wallets of pc gamers, its contention/penetration point into the console market Has always been about its staggering system requirments and how Graphics this amazing, sandbox style, crazy physics and map Size that could Scale a flight sim could NEVER be done on a Console.. Well it Cant, And crysis 2 Didnt.
What Crytek Did was revamp and optimise Cryengine 2 into a Very specific set of tools to Build and run the “game” On a PS3 and Xbox360. And thus began the building of Crysis 2 . The end result is a pretty impressive console game on par with most of its “average” Contemperaries on the Platform .
If you are a Fan of Crysis however, and acutally Loved the game and have played it less than half as much as myself on a decent Pc you will be extremely dissapointed.
The maps are glaringly small and the use of Assets/graphics for Console immediatly made me feel half of my world was gone .
You must understand I was replaying the original games for at least 2 to 3 weeks on a regular basis leading up to the release , Getting ready for part 2, just itching to get some in new york.
What followed for me as a player was dissapointment after dissapointment from AI to Actual options and boggling Control features like prone and and leaning around corners simply werent in the game .
The suit has been nerfed for console controlls and the deeper you go into the game the further you get to realize that this was never getting a pc treatment .
Mele flat out breaks at times and you have to restart the game, And a laundry list of minor and Major bugs the lion share of which do not exist on the console versions show how absolutely Crytek has turned thier back on the community that made them.
What Irks me most is how EA and Crytek both tryed to tout this as the best PC crysis yet .
At the end of the day What I See is a new franchise that exists oblivious to its Pc roots . So if youve never played crysis 1, or hated it and are a Console player to start with , sure give it a whirl , you might even have some fun .
The rest of us will just have to hope for another forward thinking Developer to pick up the torch and Make games that acutally Use the resources of the PC with the desire to create something truly epic.
DUMB AI
I get the impression that some of you would hate this game even if it was the best FPS ever made by anyone simply because it also has a console version instead of being PC only.
The original Crysis wasn’t all that to shout about to begin with, sure the maps were massive but that meant that about 80% of it had NOTHING going on in it and, I can’t speak for everyone but everytime I wanted to go my own way to an objective I bumped into an impassable, badly textured mountain or cliff face I couldn’t power jump over, basically it wasn’t the open world experience it claimed it was. Plus although the AI wasn’t as daft as Far Cry (the games predecessor with it’s “are you ok?” statements over and over to npcs you’d just filled with 50 P90 bullets) I still caught some of the KPA getting stuck in barrels and running backwards and forwards because a fence was in their way and perhaps the most vexing of all the absolutely useless nanosuit that may as well have just been a flack jacket.
Crysis 2 may have dodgy AI (but that’s par for the course, last time I saw great AI was on the N64 classic Turok 2), it may have what many perceive as bad graphics (although if you read what the developers have actually got it to do and still maintain 60fps you should be applauding them) but at least this time it doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t. There’s no massive open world because buildings are in the way, 90% of the map volume contains something to do and this time the nanosuit actually lets you be a supersoldier (or post human warrior if you like) ripping turrets off vehicles and strangling aliens to death while sneaking about undetected for more than 10 seconds at a time.
The whole direct x 11 thing is another bone of contention for people, but considering how bad the dx10 implementation was in Crysis 1 anyway (partly because of how bad direct x 10 was and how clunky Vista was, not all Crytek’s fault) I don’t see what the fuss is, add to this the knowledge that only 2% of Steam users have both a direct x 11 video card and a direct x 11 operating system (most people still sticking with XP even with newer hardware) and it becomes clear why dx11 wasn’t a big priority for Crytek (or anyone really).
Sure it’s buggy (what PC game isn’t) and it’s clearly been designed to make use of console hardware (including a pretty good implementation of joypad controls Crysis 1 didn’t have, although warhead’s were passable) it’s not a bad game even though as with so many developers these days it’s less of a game and more of a “look at our game engine” (although there HAVE been better tech demo games than this, like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament) but this can work, after all Halo was basically an xbox tech demo and it went on to spawn games that set the bar and still draw the online contingent on xbox live in their masses.
Personally I can’t wait to see what they do with Crysis 3.
Haven’t played Crysis 2, but I did actually just recently finish Crysis 1 and I have to say…it really wasn’t anything special. Most of the complaints Kahless mentions are pretty accurate.
The maps were somewhat open, but more just in the sense that there wasn’t a single narrow “canyon” path (except in some missions) between your start point and finish point. But you still couldn’t go literally anywhere on the island. As a separate issue, though, why would that have been such a wonderful thing anyway? People rave about “sandbox” games but they always seem unfocused and with a lot of pointless actions. Yes, you can go hither and thither and yon, and do all manner of pointless tasks, but in the end, so what?
Crysis 1′s suit, while initially sort of interesting, was also largely useless due to the limited power. And besides, design-wise, it wasn’t that far removed from, say, Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. You’ve got your super powers, but you have a limited ability to use the. Rah rah.
It was pretty, though, I’ll say that. And I do feel that it took advantage of the hardware I have now, in some cases actually grinding to a halt (such as the final battle on the ship which basically dropped my framerate to single digits on a new machine). But the story, characters, and gameplay all felt pretty humdrum to me.
Post a Comment