Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

First of all I'd like to mention that I never played Crysis1. All I knew coming into this game was that there is some guy who's wearing a special suit, and that the game takes place in New York.

Oddly enough, thats most of what you would come to know by the end of the game as well, since the ending offers no closure and most of the things that are happening aren't even explained. For example, who are Cell and why are they hunting down Prophet, the protagonist? why does their leader want him dead so much? who are the aliens? why did they come here? what do those alien buildings do?

Most of the questions about the plot remain unanswered, as if the developers didn't care enough to explain everything. Perhaps you need to have played Crysis1, and if that's the case then why are the developers so keen on making this game accessible to anyone?They are trying to appeal to a new audience without explaining the story properly to anyone who is new to the series.

Even without the plot holes mentioned above, parts of the story that are explained, don't make a whole lot of sense. For example, Cell is an organization that would have fallen apart in a real world, because it's subordinates take orders as vague suggestions rather than actual commands. There is one point when the woman who works for cell Issues a command to cease fire on the protagonist, but the troops tell her to **** off. Apparently being a commanding officer at Cell is the same as being a shouty hobo in the street.

And then there is the point (and this is a spoiler, by the way) when the protagonist is captured and is being strapped in an operating table while a cutting lazer cuts his suit off, as well as parts of his body judging by the agonizing groans and screams. Then Tara comes in and set you free, at which point any normal person would have punched her in the face, since she was the one who captured you in the first place. Besides, if you planned on rescuing me, a little bit earlier would have been nice, lady. Preferably before they put me on a rack and almost tortured me to death.

There is another whoopsie point later on when the protagonist is forced to inject himself with some substance, causing me to scratch my head thinking about how he manages to stick a syringe through his armor even despite the fact that bullets have almost no effect on it. This was also a part of the story that wasn't explained properly - Like what the hell did the syringe contain? I'm guessing some sort of substance that allowed the suit to use the alien's weapons of mass destruction against them. The ending is probably the worst I've seen in quite some time, and serves as a rather confusing conclusion that wraps up the story but not really, meaning of course that there will be a sequel.

Though I suppose that a lot of people play the game for it's gameplay and not storyline. In this case, my opinion on the game will not change at all, because the gameplay is not all that great either.

First I want to talk about the special powers. There are essentially two abilities that would help you through the game - the cloaking and armor abilities. These two are enough to get you through any tight spot in the game, while the rest of the powers like super speed, nano vision, and Visor are merely fun little extras with as much practical usefullness as a glass football, and will essentially cripple you in some areas, since using two suit powers at the same time will drain the energy a lot faster. Besides, nano vision is only useful in one place in the game. That's when you are forced to run around a dark warehouse, while enemy soldiers shoot you with perfect aim and in complete darkness, without the need of night vision goggles. Apparenly nobody told the game designers that people can't see very well in the dark.

Suit upgrades are also redundant since as I said before, the basic powers are enough to get you through the game even on the hardest difficulty. The only useful upgrade is the armor enhancement hand power, at which point you can safely disregard all the other survivability upgrades. Stealth doesn't lose it's effectiveness at any stage in the game, and enemies sure as hell don't get any smarter, so stealth upgrades can pretty much be thrown out the window as well. Besides, the basic level of stealth will allow you to sneak by entire levels, making me feel a bit bad for the designers. I bet they've put a lot of effort into crafting the environments and putting down enemy soldiers, just so I could breeze through them like they weren't even there.

I'd also like to mentioned the gun upgrades are quite weak in this game. You can only put a maximum of two attachments to a single weapon, most of them being just different types of the same crosshairs. Some guns can't even be modified at all.
In fact, I have a lot of problems with the guns in this game. First of which is the fact that some guns can't be resupplied with bullets from ammo crates, or just have a very small amount of spare clips you can carry. Also, there is quite a wide variety of guns in the game, it's just that some of them are almost impossible to find. Just how rare are they? well, there are some weapons which you can only pick up once in the entire game.

That brings me to the next problem - The guns sound pathetic. Most assault rifles sound like BB guns, and are sadly the weapons you will use the most, simply because the game doesn't offer any alternatives. Rarely will you find something that packs a punch and doesn't drain it's ammo capacity in a matter of seconds. I thought the idea behind a game is to make people enjoy it, and here we have a game that treats you like a child, keeping time of just how much fun you are having, and when it thinks you've had enough, it takes the toys away from you, forcing you to sit down and do your homework.

Aside from the awfully boring guns, the game plays like your standard slow paced, cover based, regenerating health kind of shooter like every other mother****ing FPS that came out past 2004. It's especially annoying for people such as myself, who grew up on fast paced shooters in which the normal walking speed of the protagonist was something approximating 60 miles per hour, and carrying 20 guns on your character didn't cause his spine to snap like a twix bar. Nowadays you can't carry more than 3 guns at the same time, and what's worse, you have got to use your Iron sights first or else your bullets will fly all over the place.

The game's UI is something I can complain about as well. It's not the most cluttered I've ever seen, but when you combine that with, say, the armor powerup and make sharp turns or try to run really fast, the motion blur effects makes it look like your screen was dumped inside a particularly dim aquarium, which can cause a severe headache after a while.
What's worse is that the horrible blur effects can'be turned off, and your graphical settings are very limited. That brings me to my next complaint - That this is a console port, and a pretty annoying one too. First thing you see as you boot up the game for the first time is a dialogue box saying "please adjust your TV settings until the figure is barely visible", insulting PC gamers even before you even started playing the game. Then there is the grpahics setup, which only allows to change resolution, while other effects like shadows, blurs, draw distance, etc is nowhere to be seen. Also, the game only supports DX9 while as far as I heard, Crysis 1 supported DX10. I suppose then that the reduction was due to the fact that this is a console port, and if you ask me, I think that the graphics are not all that great indeed.

Though I guess the biggest downfall of this game is the AI, which is quite horrendous. How bad is it you ask? well, it got to a point when a group of 6 guys were standing in one spot staring at each other while I stood behind a corner, threw a granade in the middle, and laughed as they run around in circles and bump into each other before they get torn into ribbons. Either that, or occasionally they simply stand around doing nothing while I gun them down.

Sometimes they can't seem to decide if they want to take cover or attack me, causing them to run back and forth in my line of fire. Granades makes them especially spastic, more so when an enemy is charging towards you from a mile away so he can punch you in the face instead of using his gun. Roll down a granade at his feet just before he reaches you, and he will run all the way back like a frightened kid who seeks the comforting touch of his mother.

Though when it comes to actual shooting, the AI rarely misses, and it's aim is dead on no matter how far away you are. It somewhat balances the usual suckiness of the AI, but it's still too apparent to completely break immersion whenever the AI feels like acting wierd.

The only good thing about this game is ironically the part that fits the least with the game play - which is the soundtrack. Most of the time it's slow, creepy, and conveys a sense of tension, completely in contradiction to the abundant noisy shooting galleries. Not only do you not hear the music most of the time due to constant gun shots and explosions, but also since the game rarely has a quiet moment when the music actually feels appropriate.

In addition to the horrible AI, I experienced quite a wide array of bugs. There were a few places where I was forced to reload because I became stuck in the scenery or surrounded by an invisible wall all of a sudden, sometimes right after a cut scene. Though the biggest problem I encountered was the fact that my hand catalyst arbitrarily reset itself to 0 at least four or five times in the game, and I know for a fact that it was not triggered by a scripted event. How? Well, I spent half the friggin game with 0 points even though the game clearly said that I gained an X amount every time I came close to an alien corpse, and only after killing the last boss did I finally gain some points. Yeah, thanks Crysis2, but I could have used those a bit earlier.

To top all the above issues, the game seems rather short - maybe 6-7 hours long if you also count the time you need to spend while running around looking for the stupid dog tags and souvenirs - A mechanic which is blatantly shoehorned into the game for those tiresome obsessives that play games only for the sake of bragging about their achievements. Though I suppose Crytek didn't mind the fact that stopping to collect trinkets in the middle of the ****ing apocalypse is mind numbingly stupid. Is self preservation and survival of the human race not a pressing enough issue to lay aside the want to spend hours running around like a **** looking for random household items? It's as if instead of helping dig out survivors from under debris in Japan after the tsunami disaster, the local police and firefighter force will be more interested in digging out and preserving ancient pottery and silverware.

I guess in the end though, It wasn't a horrible experience but it certainly wasn't very entertaining either. Crysis2 is bland generic and predictable, just like many console gamers are, to which this game is obviously catering. Crysis2 is no longer PC gamer centric. It's a game that chose the easy way out by appealing to the lowest common denominators. It offends me not only as a customer, but also as a PC gamer, which is why I cannot recommend this game to anyone who prefers the PC as a gaming platform, especially not to those who liked Crysis 1.