Crysis 2

Crysis was a game well known for its visuals as well as its open-ended gameplay. As a marine strapped with a million-dollar Nanosuit on a fictitious island, players could analyze and approach an enemy encounter any way they wanted to, be it with deadly stealth or excessive force. With the move to a more concrete jungle, developer Crytek have sacrificed that beloved open-ended mechanic, but Crysis 2 still remains a gorgeous and enjoyable shooter that thankfully will not melt your PC this time round.

Crysis 2 takes place nearly three years after the events of Crysis, where New York has been hit by a deadly virus and an alien invasion. Most of the citizens are dead, and the few that survived are dying painful deaths. You are Alcatraz, a special ops dude sent in to survey the situation and provide backup to a certain scientist. Obviously, things don’t go quite as planned and you end up in a world of hurt. As fate closes one door, it opens up another for you and hands you the Nanosuit, leaving New York’s salvation in your hands. Like its predecessor, Crysis 2 is all about the Nanosuit. Thanks to its plethora of abilities, it allows players to adopt and run with their very own style of gameplay, opening the door for multiple play-throughs. Most of the suit’s abilities are back from the first game, so you can run fast, cloak yourself, jump real high and hit real hard. Where the first game tied it all down to the mouse, Crysis 2 allows players to map the suit’s abilities to the keyboard. This kind of a streamlined control scheme actually facilitates gameplay, so instead of clicking the middle mouse and then choosing cloak from a dial, I simply hit [E] and bam; invisible man in the house. This definitely adds a layer of swiftness to the game where players truly feel like predatory hunters.

 

Unfortunately, the new system is also a bit imbalanced. Shooting even a silenced pistol while cloaked rapidly drains your energy, and unless you get to cover quickly, you’ll soon be visible to all. This could be the game’s way of challenging me, but at the same time, Crysis 2’s enemy AI is so dense that I rarely felt threatened or challenged. In fact, there were times I felt bad killing them. Most enemies were so clueless as to what was going on that they just stood on the battlefield as I ran around with reckless abandon slaughtering their mates. Even after blowing up cars near some their guard posts, they never budged an inch. Then there were times during intense firefights when I saw certain enemies running away – into walls. Their stupidity also shines through in some of their voice communication that either makes no sense or is totally inappropriate for the situation. Also, if I stealth kill some dude a mile away, how is it that his compadre suddenly decides to ask him if he’s all right at that very same moment? Am I fighting psychics now?

Things do improve a bit when you start battling the Ceph, but besides their acrobatic, fast movements, they charge at you in a straight line, making it very easy to kill them. Besides the run-of-the-mill grunts, you’ll face some mini bosses who, once again, can be killed pretty easily thanks to their lack of brain cells. After around an hour into the game, you’ll be able to upgrade your suit using nano catalysts dropped by dead Ceph, making you an even more powerful force to reckon with. Now, if I was challenged by the game, this would validate my upgrades, but running around virtually invincible wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

There’s a huge hue and cry about the game’s visuals and about how Crytek have let PC gamers down by not putting in DirectX 11 support in the game, but the truth of the matter is that the game still looks phenomenal. It’s highly scalable as well. On my modest GTX 280, the game performed flawlessly at a 1920x1080 resolution on Very High settings. You could nitpick about how Crytek has used certain low res textures in the game, but unless you actually sit and zoom into stuff, it won’t be apparent during the frantic action.

 

New York looks phenomenal and the amount of detail that has gone into recreating the Big Apple is admirable. Watching this once thriving and lively city reduced to a crumbling reflection of its former self is chilling. Special mention goes out to the audio department; they’ve done a brilliant job with the sounds that accompany your every move, be it metallic clink of detaching a turret, firing off rounds from your machine gun, or the satisfying thump of a shotgun. The game’s score has been performed by Hans Zimmer and it grows on you through the course of the game. The Xbox 360 version obviously doesn’t look as good as its PC counterpart, but it plays just as well thanks to a solid control scheme. Crytek have managed to milk the Xbox 360 for what it’s worth and even if Crysis 2 may not be the best game to grace Microsoft’s console, it certainly is top contender for that honor.

Multiplayer in Crysis 2 is more Call of Duty than Battlefield primarily because of the absence of vehicles. Like Activision’s juggernaut, you play well and earn points that can be used to purchase and enhance upgrades like better cloaking, faster reloading, stronger armor, etc. Of course, the biggest challenge in multiplayer is balancing your suit to face real opponents. By default, your suit will have certain abilities like the ability to cloak or sprint faster and the more you use them, the cooler stuff you unlock. The game even has its variation of killstreaks, which, if you haven’t played any Call of Duty game in the recent past, means racking up an ‘x’ amount of kills without dying. Successfully doing so will allow you to call in for radar support (displaying nearby enemies on the map), a devastating laser strike, and lots more.

But like every multiplayer game in the recent past, the game’s multiplayer is not without its issues. For starters, on the PC, I had to enter my CD key multiple times when the game should have registered it the first time. Even though the game released here on the international release date, there was a dearth of low ping servers for us Indians. I understand this isn’t an issue with the game, but it does end up crippling your experience nevertheless. But perhaps one of my biggest frustrations stemmed from the fact that I suddenly lost nearly three levels out of nowhere, along with my unlocks that I had earned with them. I do hope this is rectified in a patch immediately. All issues aside, I still enjoyed the game’s multi-player, as there are few games that offer the kinetic and frantic action Crysis 2 brings to the table.

I was a bit apprehensive about the game at first because of all the negativity around how Crytek ‘sold out’ by developing games for the console, ditching their die-hard PC gamers in the process. Yes, Cytek may be guilty of that to a certain extent, but I don’t really see a big issue as long as the product delivers. Besides the dumb AI and a few multiplayer niggles, Crysis 2 is a visual powerhouse backed by lofty production values, solid gameplay and frantic action across both single and multiplayer.