Crysis 2 PC review

Let’s get one thing out of the way first.
Yes, there is a good chance that you can run it.

The first Crysis ( and to a lesser extent: Warhead) required an insane amount of tweaking and config file editing for most of us just to get a decent frame rate.
This time around I’m happy to report little of that has been necessary, though you may be shocked to learn that there are only three graphical options “high”, “very high” and “extreme”.
To limit us to only three choices which cover what must be a massive array of everything from shader settings to AA, feels severely limiting at first.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this might be a console port, indeed the controls are very streamlined and there are quick-time events, but you’d be missing the point.
Crysis 2 is an incredibly well optimized game across all three platforms.

The first game was regarded as a technical marvel, and is still used for benchmarking to this day, but that’s the thing. To me, it’s more of a technical feat to create a game that looks good and actually runs for most of the people that buy it.
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Story

You play as Alcatraz, a marine called in to New York in the middle of a pandemic.
A virus has ravaged the city and your team is tasked with rescue of a scientist.
In the games opening moments you’re reintroduced to Prophet from the first game, one thing leads to another and you end up wearing a fancy Nanosuit.
The first few hours of the game are actually fairly slow story-wise, you may be scratching your head wondering when the game is going to begin. But just keep slogging through some otherwise very entertaining combat and gorgeous environments and the pace picks up and things get interesting.

A shame that the interest never really solidifies into anything great, and is marred by plot holes and some confusing issues.
I’ve finished the game a couple of times now, and I’m still scratching my head over a couple of things.

For example;
At the beginning of the game your squad gives no clear indication of awareness of the alien invasion that is underway.
Yet in the next few hours as the action unfolds; not only does no one (enemy or friendly) seem even slightly surprised that there are now ALIENS DESTROYING NEW YORK, they actually all seem to know that the aliens are called the “Ceph”, in fact they’ve known about them long enough to coin the term “Squiddies”/”Squids” commonly amongst their ranks.

I’ve finished Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead and I didn’t even know the names of the aliens.
(yes it’s short for “cephalopod”, but when did humanity come to a consensus on “ceph”?)

It very much feels like Alcatraz is late to the show for most of the game, in fact its very little time at all before you notice buildings collapsing all over the place.
When did all this havoc occur?
Was it in the five minute opening scene?
The time Alcatraz spent unconscious at the beginning?

And where is all the hardware that can make New York skyscrapers fall over?
In fact….where the hell is the military??

For the first half of the game you encounter no marines at all, just “Cell” troops. Cell is an evil PMC that conveniently gets in your way from the start.
It wouldn’t be a very interesting game if the streets were full of friendly, helpful marines, obviously. At the very start of the game you witness some Cell operatives executing what appears to be a marine.
Did this private corporation really overpower the marines?

Their job seems to be to kill innocent civilians and provide cannon fodder for aliens later, wouldn’t it be much more likely that they might team up with the army to, you know….save the earth???
While they did a good job of making it easy to hate Cell, the whole thing made little sense.

I can’t say much else without plot spoilers but I will mention that there were a couple of moments where it really would have been in Alcatraz’s best interest to speak. Considering he never does they should have avoided putting him in those situations.

It may seem like I’m giving the story a lot of flak here, it’s actually because its the only mediocre aspect of an otherwise outstanding single player experience.

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Presentation

It will be hard to say anything about Crysis 2 without mentioning the visuals, but honestly the presentation lends a massive amount of “credibility” (or suspension of disbelief-ability) to the story with its amazingly realized environments.
The game is great on its own but there is no point denying that it would be a much less interesting game with out the pretty pictures.

What is surprising though, is that there is no DirectX11 support at the time of writing, and no sign of it either.

As mentioned earlier the game will run quite well on a pretty broad range of specs.
It’s no slouch on consoles but clearly if you have the hardware for it the PC version of Crysis 2 delivers phenomenal visuals, amongst the best I’ve ever seen in fact. But it’s still not the massive leap that Crysis was.

With that said, I must say I really prefer the art direction this time round. Crysis 2 has a vibrant, colorful style.
New York is a lavishly devastated place and the game has several jaw-dropping sequences that no screenshot can do justice.
Whereas in many games, buildings can seem fake or appear as a plain backdrop or cardboard cutout; here they are weighty, massive and entirely convincing.
Obviously some truly talent people at work here
Weapon modeling is uniformly gorgeous and I often found myself ogling them.

One strange aside, is that the water here is not as amazing as its predecessor, though considering there is not too much water on the streets of New York it’s hardly a pertinent issue.

The sound design also fares very well here;
The “Ceph” have their own signature squeaks and beeps and the cacophony produced by an exploding wall or falling building is convincing.
Weapons give distinct thuds and clicks, the ambient noise warps and softens around you as you cloak.
The score is varied and suitable but never intrusive.

I mentioned that the plot and story were lacking, well a good deal of that is made up for by an excellent voice cast. The dialogue is good and there are some great performances, particularly from the “is he good?/is he bad?” character of Hargreave.
Using your visor you can listen in on some enemy conversations, often about you, and its nice to hear that the radio chatter actively changes according to whether you are being stealthy or taking the rambo approach.

If I have one point of contention with the sound design it’s the nanosuit voice, mainly that you cannot deactivate it.

The actual voice itself sounds cool and in the first game it was a novelty, but even then I turned it off after a few minutes.
Here you are forced to listen to “Cloak engaged” and “Maximum Armor” every ten seconds or so (even more in multiplayer).
At this stage I don’t even hear it anymore but the ability to silence it is a strange omission, also there were several key moments in the game were I’m trying to listening to a character when the suit will literally talk over them, detailing some mundane objective. In at least one instance I didn’t know what either had said.

Another thing that stuck out – but perhaps only for me – was that many of the enemies are voiced by the same voice actor who played “Sarge” in Bad Company 2, this would be fine if he didn’t also voice one of your team mates right from the start of the game.
I almost didn’t want to kill some of the Cell operatives when I heard Sarge’s friendly voice coming from them, I half expected some witty banter.

I can’t find a source to verify he was also the guy at the start though so it may be inaccurate.
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Gameplay

The star of the show here is the nanosuit, as with previous entries you can cloak all Predator-style, form a protective armor, jump massive heights and perform feats of strength such as picking up an enemy and lobbing him into a group of his buddies. Rounding it off is the visor which allows for long distance observation, target tracking, thermal vision and the like.

People are bemoaning the supposed linearity of this game compared to the first, but the sense of “sandbox” style gameplay was really an illusion then.
The levels in Crysis 1 were very linear, while there may have been a lot of real-estate the majority of it wasn’t populated with anything interesting, and all the action usually took place in the same parts of the map each time you played the game.

This time things are more focused, yes. But the idea that this is somehow a Call-of-Duty style series of scripted events is entirely false. In fact you are given huge leeway to decide how to approach each situation.
Each area has one massive arena-like section for you to play with all the toys and possibilities that the premise provides. These areas have multiple paths and can be approached guns blazing or without killing anyone at all.

One interesting addition now, is that your visor gives very detailed appraisal of these areas, way too detailed in fact. It basically holds your hand and suggests where to sneak and what to avoid.
Not really sure why this is necessary (though perhaps they sought to highlight some possibly entertaining engagement they had set up) as the game is generally very easy. You’re supposed to feel almost invincible, and you do, but the drawback from this is that the default difficulty setting is too easy, I suggest playing the game on veteran for a challenge.
Once you’ve completed the game you unlock the “Post-Human” difficulty, which forces you to be sneaky but again is hardly impossible thanks to your suit.

Controls have been greatly streamlined. You don’t need to switch to Maximum Power or Maximum Speed, you can simply hold the jump button to do a massive jump that drains energy or press the context sensitive button to grab an enemy or rip a heavy machine-gun from its mounting.
Sprinting is nowhere near as fast as it was in the last game, and it feels odd that you cant even do a light jog if you have no suit energy, stuck to strolling to cover when being ripped to shreds by bullets….must be a damn heavy suit.

Getting from rooftop to rooftop is also much easier now, thanks to a ledge-grab ability that kicks in if you just miss the jump, again it just ads to the sense that you are unstoppable.
It’s a lot of fun.

Enemy AI is a mixed bag, sometimes they will attempt to flank you or vigilantly hunt you down if you make an appearance. Other times they will get caught in geometry or stand clueless next to a guy who’s head you just blew off.
They follow a Metal-Gear alert cycle, and will eventually forget about you even if there are a dozen bodies lying around them but at least they will call for reinforcements.

Alien enemies are a good bit better, and seem to notice you more often even when cloaked, the design here really stands up to close scrutiny. They’re fantastic looking.
It’s a bit odd though, that there is not a single appearance of any enemy from the previous games, I mean obviously they are the same creatures inside different exosuits but the omission is strange considering the tentacled metal enemies were iconic Crysis imagery (albeit a pain in the ass to fight).

Also sadly missing is the boss fights against titanic alien walkers like in the first game. There is a cool new enemy walker type enemy called a Pinger that is great fun to fight, but nothing as epic as the previous two games.

The games finale was underwhelming in comparison and in fact quite easy, though still fun.
It also felt like there were fewer on-rails sections to break up the action, and no VTOL section or anything like that.

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Multiplayer

The multiplayer component bares many similarities to Call of Duty, albeit with suit powers. There are the equivalent of killstreak rewards by collecting dog-tags , and various modes that will seem pretty familiar to anyone. There is one potentially interesting mode where one side has the good weapons and the other has the nanosuit tech, it could have led to some great SplinterCell style cat and mouse multiplayer but unfortunately it devolves into a frag-fest in most cases.

Weapon customization doesn’t stray from the single-player campaign but there are some fairly unique suit upgrades.
I must admit when I first dived in it was a joy to behold the whole thing in action, the levels look fantastic and though others have reported performance issues it was smooth as butter for me.
The suit powers complement the COD style action quite well, and while it’s not entirely unique it never feels derivative .

After several hours though, quite a number of problems became very apparent, and a quick browse through online forums reveals that these are all too common.

Firstly there is a problem with stat tracking. On my first couple of matches I leveled up to level 5 and unlocked several classes, I logged out and played again later to discover I was level 2 with nothing unlocked. This happened again until after the third time of getting to level 5 it stuck after logging out and in again.

Next problem is that jumping into a instant action doesn’t seem to work and many people report problems connecting to any servers or even logging in at all.

Thirdly there are rumors of DRM issues and finally there is a massive number of hackers already using aimbots and the like.
In my short time with the multiplayer – about four hours so far – I have observed three separate people shoot me while remaining fully cloaked in the killcam.
In comparison, I can only think of one specific instance in the past year of playing Bad Company2 that I was 100% positive that someone was cheating beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I also regularly observe that what happens in the killcam isn’t what happened while I was playing but can only assume that is a lag issue with me, even if I have the same ping as my killer.

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Final thoughts

Crysis 2 is a massively enjoyable single player experience.
While the story is lacking the engaging gameplay and engrossing action more than make up for that.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s the best looking shooter in existence at this point, in my opinion it trumps the original.

Hopefully they will release some modding tools as before, then we can see what wonders the community can create with CryEngine3.

The multiplayer is sightly broken at the moment, but there is still fun to be had if you can put up with the issues mentioned.

Bottom line, I’ve finished the game twice and I’m looking forward to doing it again on Post-Human difficulty.
This game has massive replay value and there is nothing else quite like it.

Once you get sucked in it’s hard to imagine anyone not being carried away in the intense, adrenalin soaked adventure.
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