Crysis 2 Final Thoughts

"As Alcatraz steps onto the ledge and looks out across the roof of the building in front of him, he accesses his tactical options through his heads up display. The roof is covered with AC units, ducts elevated a few feet off the ground, and two large green houses. There is an elevated platform at the backside topped by a small room covered in glass windows.

The roof is currently occupied by 5 aliens known as the Ceph. Three of the grunt types, one of the harder elite types, and one of the massive hunter types. Alcatraz activates his Nanosuit's cloaking ability, sneaks up behind the first alien, and jams a blade through the underside of the alien's "jaw".

This temporarily disables his cloaking device and he's spotted by a nearby grunt. He sprints at the alien, enabling the Nanosuit's speed ability. When he reaches his target he grabs the alien by the throat and tosses it over the edge of the building. He immediately spots his next target just on the other side of a line of air ducts that cover the roof. He sprints toward the alien and slides underneath the duct while firing his K-Volt sub-machine gun. The alien falls.

He feels something hit him in the chest and he flies backward, landing on his rear. It's one of the elites. In a split second he lobs a grenade at the alien, it tries to dive out of the way but it's too slow and blast rips the alien apart.

He turns to his final target, the large alien that looks more like a walking tank. It has a large shield attached to it's left arm and an energy cannon on the other. There's no time to evade and so Alcatraz activates the Nanosuit's enhanced armor ability, which turns him into somewhat of a walking tank himself.

The Nanosuit soaks up the first salvo from the alien's energy cannon while Alcatraz grabs a nearby JAW missile launcher and fires it at the alien. The first shot, while a direct hit, only stumbles the monstrous alien. But as the alien attempts to regain it's composure, the second missile makes contact, causing a geyser of purplish, pink goo to erupt from where the alien's "neck" used to be. Alcatraz disables his enhanced armor ability to allow the Nanosuit's energy systems to recharge. He scavenges any nearby ammo and moves on to his next objective."

This is your typical firefight in Crysis 2.

Crysis 2's gameplay requires your constant attention, but in a good way. I'm sure that if you played on the easiest difficulty you could make it through most of the game like your typical FPS, but even then there are certain parts where you would have to employ some strategy. And by strategy, I mean the Nanosuit.

In Crysis 2 the Nanosuit 2.0 is by far your most effective weapon, because even if you had no weapons, there are ways you could use the suit to take out enemies. The Nanosuit has multiple "suit abilities" which are:

1. Speed - Basically your typical sprint ability that you'll find in just about every modern FPS, except that you run faster than in most other FPS's. You can also sprint until your suit's energy runs out.
2. Strength - This is used in multiple ways like jumping really high, power kicking objects (cars, dumpsters, crates, etc.), pulling yourself up on ledges, and grabbing and throwing objects and enemies.
3. Nanovision - This is basically thermal vision, highlighting warm objects like steam pipes or living beings in shades of orange and red.
4. Tactical Display - This will show points of interest like enemies, weapons, ammo, objectives, and tactical advantage points on your HUD. You can also select and highlight them so that they are visible in your normal visor mode.
5. Cloak - this is basically an active camouflage or invisibility mode. This ability really drains your energy the more you move and will deactivate if you attack an enemy or fire a weapon.
6. Armor - This ability overlays a honeycomb style graphic around the edges of the screen and enhances your suit's armor making you capable of withstanding large amounts of damage. It also significantly reduces your mobility.

The two main abilities are Cloak and Armor and are two of the only abilities that can't be used at the same time. Each one represents a completely different play style than the other. Almost every mission in Crysis 2 gives the player a choice on how to approach the mission. Do you want to cloak and sneak around stealth killing your enemies? Or do you want to activate armor and go guns blazing? Your choice. The environments have also been tailored to this concept as most areas are pretty open allowing for multiple ways to approach them.

Crysis 2 is a very open ended game, when compared to other extremely linear games in the genre like the Call of Duty franchise. Crysis 2 really has a lot more in common with the Halo franchise than CoD. One of the things that makes Crysis 2 so much fun is it seems to be a very well done marriage of CoD and Halo. It really does employ the big "set piece" moments that you'd find in CoD, while also utilizing larger, more open ended areas like in Halo.

The game is set in New York City in the year 2023, which is in the future, but not so far in the future that it seems unfamiliar. You spend the first half of the game fighting C.E.L.L. (Crynet Enforcement & Local Logistics) soldiers, and the second half assisting Marines in fighting Ceph (alien invaders) warriors.

The gameplay is very familiar and really does feel like a mix of CoD and Halo with the controller layout being almost identical to CoD and the suit abilities being tied to the bumpers like in Halo Reach. The game also employs a very subtle cover system that works surprisingly well. When you get close to a wall or object that can be used as cover, your character will raise his gun straight up indicating that you are in cover. At this point holding down the left trigger to look down the sights will cause him to pop out from cover, and releasing the left trigger causes him to pop back behind the cover.

The single player campaign unfolds over the course of a couple of days as you and the Marines try and fight off the Ceph invasion. The story isn't bad, I never felt like something didn't make sense or was just flat out dumb, but I also felt like they could have done a better job of letting you know what was going on. The Ceph, who look like purplish, pink colored squid like aliens that wear metal armor, are basically presented as the mindless invader that just wants to eliminate the human race. A little more information or interaction with the Ceph could've really helped to flesh things out.

Overall I really enjoyed the single player and have already started a new game on the SuperSoldier difficulty. My only major complaint is that the game can be pretty rough around the edges. I came across at least 3 bugs that caused me to have to either quit out to the main menu and reload my game, or quit all the way to the Xbox dashboard and restart the whole game. There were also times when the framerate dropped to a crawl for reasons I couldn't pin down, considering at those times there didn't seem to be more happening than in other parts of the game. But those few hiccups didn't keep me from enjoying the campaign in any significant way.

Crysis 2's multiplayer is very similar to CoD in that as you level up you unlock things like custom classes, weapon attachments, suit abilities that in some cases are like CoD perks, while others are exactly like armor abilities from Halo Reach. Each map also has a different trio of killstreak rewards like in CoD that range from things like a radar that shows the position of all enemies on the map to a Ceph gunship. Whenever you kill an opponent they drop dog tags that can be picked up by simply running over the downed enemies. These dog tags act similar to the titles found in CoD as there are many that can be unlocked and serve as a sort of "player card".

As far as actually playing the multiplayer goes, I've really enjoyed it so far and intend on playing a lot more of it. Things like advanced armor gives you a helping hand if someone gets the sneak on you, while the cloak ability adds a stealth element to what would otherwise be your average run and gun multiplayer match. Sneaking up behind an enemy while cloaked and breaking their neck or jamming a knife into their heart in an assassination move is very satisfying. The fact that you don't have to pick between the abilities like in Reach is nice and helps Crysis 2 really stand out from the competition. Also the ability to do power jumps and pull yourself up on ledges adds a nice verticality to the maps as well. Another welcome change is the amount of shots it takes to drop an enemy seems to fall right in between CoD and Halo, which is to say that it's not so easy that you die almost instantly, and it's not so long that it feels like it takes forever to drop someone.

I really feel like Crytek has done an outstanding job of bringing a game that was for the most part unknown to console players, and making it an immediate competitor to the big two console FPS franchises. Crysis 2 manages to bring something new and fun to what is an over saturated console FPS market, and that is worthy of applause in itself.

Oh and the graphics are ridiculous.