Back From The Park - Thoughts About Crysis 2

I finally sat down during my time off and both played and finished Crysis 2. I did play the first few levels of the game when it first launched but the DX10 version had some annoying glitches, such as a flickering effect that took place in any outdoor day time scenes. I recently found out that the reason for this glitch was because I am using a dual graphic card setup. So a patch was released and I downloaded it, and it fixed it.

So when I knew I had two weeks’ vacation coming up, I always book the week of E3 off, I looked at my PC pile of shame list and decided it was time to take another crack at Crysis 2. For those who are wondering, I played the game on the normal difficulty. I played it at 1920x1200 and all settings set to “Extreme”.

My setup is:

• Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 960(3.20GHz,4.8GT/s,8MB)
• 12GB 1333MHz (3x4GB) Tri Channel Memory
• Dual 2GB ATI® Radeon™ HD 5970 graphics card

From the outset Crysis 2 is story driven. Unlike Crysis, which has the bare basics of a story, which was purely for setup, Crysis 2 is set after an Alien invasion of New York City, and the heavy story hand of the game is played from the beginning. The first Crysis biggest fault was for about two thirds of the game, the gameplay was open and the story was slowly told to you. For the final third the game became extremely linear and the story was way too heavy handed and it totally spoiled the final act of the game. Crysis 2 finds a far better balance between story and gameplay, it’s not perfect by any means, but it’s a big step forward from Crysis.

When Crysis 2 was been previewed and promoted Crytek spoke about the game been set in an “Urban Jungle” and would bring New York’s vertically into the gameplay. While there are moments in the game when you are about twenty to thirty stories above ground and you can see the war between the humans and Aliens been fought below you, I much preferred the open world feel of Crysis then the vertical world feel of Crysis 2. I do love the little details of Alcatraz grabbing onto a ledge and pulling himself up, or seeing his feet kick up when you are knocked down by an explosion.

The controls have evolved too. In Crysis you use the middle mouse button to access your suits abilities and while you can still do this in Crysis 2. The three main abilities have been mapped to the keyboard, “Q = Armour”, “E= Stealth”, “Shift = Power”. At first I found it a little awkward to get use to the keyboard mapping and continued to use the middle mouse button to access the abilities. That was until I was in the middle of a battle and then the keyboard mapping clicked with me. When I was using the middle mouse button I generally or naturally stopped moving to take a look at what I was selecting, but the keyboard mapping I found the battle sections became far batter and felt more natural as I was able to easy switch depending on the situation.

The main issue with Crysis 2 are the set pieces. The game pretty much boils down to you entering an three or four levelled area, and pretty much get from A to B, and sometimes for variety you may to do X, Y & Z  on the way to B. Yes it is cool and impressive to run up three flights of stairs and then jump out of a window and deliver a crushing fist stomp to your enemy. But I much preferred the openness of the first Crysis that really allowed you to create you our path. Crysis 2 does give you a larger path to traverse then most first person shooters today, it’s just feels more linear compared to the first game.