Crysis 2 (PC)

Crysis 2 : Review

If Crysis was known for one thing, it was amazing graphics. That was with good reason, as the game didn't offer much else. While it boasted a few interesting ideas, the game felt imbalanced, had bizarre difficulty spikes, and felt more like a tech demo than an actual game. With Crysis 2, Crytek has scaled back its focus on pure visual overkill with a game that still looks thoroughly gorgeous while providing something a little meatier than surface-level eye candy. It may surprise you, but there are a lot more than pretty textures to talk about.

Crysis 2 swaps the lush jungle for the war-torn streets of New York, where a killer virus is destroying civilization and a gooey race of alien invaders known as the Ceph are wrecking everything in sight. As US Marine Alcatraz, your job is to step into a superpowered Nanosuit and wipe out not only the Ceph, but the CELL private army that wants to take you down. It is a story. You likely won't remember it. Now let's blow some stuff up. Almost as soon as the player gets a gun, the improvements over the original Crysis are clear. The game's four main superpowers -- enhanced strength, extra armor, stealth and super speed -- have been altered considerably, leading to a more intuitive and balanced experience. Strength and Speed are now passive abilities -- they'll automatically kick in if you charge melee attacks or start to sprint. Armor used to be the passive default option for the Suit, but is now an activated ability, along with stealth. Unlike last time, taking advantage of the Nanosuit's powers feels rewarding rather than punishing. Activing Stealth and Armor won't drain your suit's energy within milliseconds, allowing you enough time to navigate to an advantageous position or absorb heavy fire. Balancing your offensive power against your defensive ability is a careful game, and one that provides a consistent challenge without becoming overbearing.

The levels feel smaller than Crysis', but they are better designed and the action is far tighter, with consistent pacing and a natural flow from battle to battle. Before each fight, you can scope into the territory to mark enemies, ammo crates, and tactical options. The tactical options offer cool ways to approach a battle, pointing out prime sneaking areas, useful flanking positions, and turrets that can be controlled. While none of the tactical options will dramatically alter the way a fight progresses, they are nonetheless useful little pieces of Intel that may come in handy. Crysis 2 offers players a chance to actually feel like a badass, which is something Crysis sorely lacked. With the improvements made to stealth, you can engage in serious cat-and-mouse games with your opponents, stalking your prey and stealthily murdering them, or sneaking into position, switching to max armor and spraying a confused crowd with bullets. Enemies will react to your shenanigans, crying out to allies if they see you switch abilities and homing in on your last known position. Their paranoid chatter of enemies and your ability to toy with them evokes memories of Batman: Arkham Asylum and I'd say the predatory stealth in Crysis 2 can be just as satisfying here as it was in Rocksteady's classic action title. The only thing that lets the stealth down is the randomly spotty AI, which will see enemies get stuck on scenery or sometimes kill themselves. I saw a group of about four soldiers aim a grenade at a wall and stand right in place for the explosion to take them all out. I suppose you can pretend it's the enemies freaking out and making mistakes if you don't want to break the illusion.

This is made worse by the fact that there are a few levels that have fantastic pacing and seem to be building to a crescendo that ... never happens. The game is great at building momentum, but fails to deliver in certain areas, such as one level where you fight your way through a warzone and hop into the back of an armored car, taking hold of the gun turret. Just as you're expecting to get into a huge, adrenaline-pumping shooting gallery, the game simply fades to black and you're in the next level, on foot. These issues sometimes threaten to drag down the game, but the speed and relentlessness of the combat remains a significant driving force. Crytek did an incredible job of making Crysis 2 feel like more of a shooter than it actually is, to the point where only the truly pedantic would have cause to be unsatisfied. It does a lot of things you've seen before, but it does them so much cooler than the average game that it feels like you're playing something far more original. Much has been made of the game's multiplayer and I have to say that, while I was initially unconvinced, the online content is far more engrossing than one might think. At its core -- it has to be said -- the game has been utterly, shamelessly lifted from Call of Duty. It has everything you've come to expect from a post-COD shooter -- persistent levels, kill streak rewards, perks -- and it even has the same fast paced kill/die/kill/die meat-grinder gameplay that Modern Warfarepopularized. The thing is -- though Crysis 2 is ostensibly Modern Warfare with sci-fi gadgets, it's a pretty damn good Modern Warfare with sci-fi gadgets.

Crysis 2 Official System Requirements

Minimum System Requirements:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 x2 2 Ghz or better

RAM: 2 GB of RAM

VGA: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB of memory or higher; ATI/AMD Radeon 3850HD 512Mb RAM or higher

DX: DirectX 9.0c

OS: Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, with the latest Service Pack http://gamesystemrequirements.com/ HDD: 9 GB

Sound: DirectX9c compatible

ODD: DVD-ROM with 8x speed

Network: Internet connection required for activation Recommended peripheral: Keyboard, mouse or Xbox 360 controller for Windows