Crysis 2
^{Bland and Beautiful}

12/01/2016

	Title	Crysis 2
	Developer	Crytek
	Publisher	Electronic Arts
	Relase Year	2011
	Platforms	Playstaion 3, Xbox 360, Windows PC
	Review Platform	Windows PC

     Crysis 2 is the second entry in Crytek's Crysis series of first-person shooters. The game came out around the time Modern Warfare 2 was big, so of course it fits the template of a cover-based "modern military shooter", but it really feels more like an eight hour long tech demo for the Cry Engine than anything else. The only reason I even deiced to play Crysis 2 is because I had it sitting in my Steam library from a Humble Bundle I bought a few years back. It didn't run very well on my computer at the time I got it, and I wanted to see how it would do on a shiny new gaming PC. I got bored of the game about halfway through the campaign, and the only reason I bothered to finish it was so I could write this review.

Plot:

     The plot of Crysis 2 is among the most cliche alien invasion stories I've ever heard, and yet it's made so needlessly complicated that I couldn't tell you most of the details. It also doesn't help that most of the plot points are conveyed through either vague flashbacks or twenty second mission briefings, and the player character is a faceless, mute protagonist who's only character trait seems to be a compulsion to shoot anything that moves, and blindly follow objective markers.
     Being a sequel the story picks up where the last one left of, but the game does a rather poor job of convening the events of the first game for anyone who may not have played it. The player character is just some random soldier who almost dies and is saved by a high-tech nano suit given to him by it's previous wearer who proceeds to shoot himself immediately after. Despite waking up in an abandoned building, and having almost no idea what's going on, there's no exposition dump. Instead a voice on the suit com tells soldier boy to go fight what I think is a private military force, and he just kinda rolls with it. We're never really given a reason as to why they're there,or why they care so much about taking down the guy in the nano suit, you're just supposed to shoot them because video game. Then after about an hour or so aliens show up and start killing everyone and no one really seems to question it and their presence is never explained, but now the player character is expected to save the world form aliens for no reason other than that he's the one with the magic suit.

           

     Sadly, Crysis 2 is the type of game where the designers clearly prioritized gameplay over narrative. This isn't a problem in and of itself, but instead of taking a complete back seat and only popping in for cutscenes like in Painkiller, the story is constantly shoved in your face with com chatter, and occasional scripted run-ins with other characters. Because the player character is mute, other characters don't so much talk to him as talk at him, and it can feel really unnatural. The worst part about this is that the writing and voice acting are actually pretty good, better than most games I've played recently in fact, but the character interactions are so rushed that there's not much chance for good character development, or for any of the big story beats to sink in, and the com chatter is drowned out by gunfire half the time. All the effort that went into the writing and voice acting ultimately feels like a waste and a distraction form the rest of the game.

Gameplay:

     If you've played any "AAA" cover based modern military shooter to come out since around 2008, then you should have a pretty good idea of what Crysis 2 plays like. There's a two weapon limit, sight-aiming, and chest high walls galore. The few unique things that are thrown into the mix mostly revolve around the game's optional stealth mechanics. The levels are set up in such a way that the player can choose to either run in guns blazing, or use stealth to take out enemies without others noticing, that sounds good on paper, but unfortunately the stealth mechanics are kind of half-assed. The only real stealth abilities the player has are temporary invisibility, silent mele kills form behind, and the ability to attach silencers to most weapons. Those three things would probaly be enough, excpet the stealh option is mosty a false choice, and almost every encounter turns into a giant shoot out sooner or later. In a lot of areas you have to kill every enemy before continuing, so you can't just sneak past, and if you're spotted it alerts every other enemy in the area almost immidealy. That's not to mention that most of the larger enemies have a ton of health and can't be killed with stealth takedowns anyway.

           

     As for the shooty bits that make up the majority of the experience go, they range from fun and exciting to an absolute slog to get through, but fortunately there's far more instances of the former than the latter. The first two thirds of the game, while nothing special, were overall pretty enjoyable. There's enough variety in the weapon selection and game mechanics that shooting down wave after wave of enemies never gets too stale, and making it to the next objective marker becomes more satisfying once the aliens show up and start posing more of a challenge. Crysis 2 only really starts to go downhill in the last third or so of the campaign. There's a boss fight with a giant bipedal alien turret thing, that can only be damaged from behind, and kills you almost instanty if it sees you, right around the two thirds mark. It's by far the most tedious and annoying encounter to get through in the entire game, and my first thought after I eventually beat it was 'Oh God, there are going to be more of these things aren't there', and lo and behold I was right. Granted, the other two encounters with the alien robot turrets aren't quite as bad because there's more supplies and better cover, but they're still a pain in the ass and they really bring down the last part of the campaign. That's to say nothing of the fact that instead of a final boss, we get an encounter with three of the cheapest enemies in the game, who we've never seen before until this point, twenty meters from the final objective marker. They're identical to the elite alien troops that have been part of nearly every encounter since the aliens showed up, except they deal more damage, turn invisible, and take three clips worth of ammo each to bing down. It sucks because I actually enjoyed most of the earlier sections of the campaign, but the last bit was a chore to get through and the ending wasn't remotely worth it in my opinion.
     Crysis 2 also has a number of neat little gameplay details that make it stand out from the crowd a bit. For one thing, it manages to avert a problem that many similar games have, where there are too many guns that may as well be the same weapon. Instead of a dozen or so machine guns that all feel the same with a million different variations of each, there's basically one weapon of each type (sniper rifle, shotgun, etc.) and each weapon as a bunch of scopes and other attachments that are collected throughout the game and can be swapped out on the fly with what amounts to a quick select menu, and there's a similar menu to swap suit upgrades. I love this approach because it adds a good deal of variety to the gameplay without adding redundancy, or forcing the player to bing up an inventory screen, and I wish more games in general would do this type of thing. In fact the UI design overall is some of the best I've seen recently. The developers did an excellent job making it feel like you are in the nano suit, with the entire HUD looking like it's projected onto the suit visor, it even retains this look during mission briefings. Details like this also extend to the gameplay and level design, for example large objects that would normally be static meshes have physics properties and can be kicked around, which really helps to sell the strength of the nano suit, and makes the game feel more realistic at the same time. They even use the suit as an explanation to overcome ludo-narrative dissonance that's usually associated with regenerating health. The biggest downside to the design of the nano suit though, is that all the suit augmentations pull from the same energy bar, inducing nano-vision, which is Crysis 2's idea of a flashlight. If you were one of those people who thought this same system in the original Deus Ex was annoying, let me assure you that it is far, far worse in Crysis 2. Aside from that, the biggest annoyance is the metallic voice that always has to reiterate every suit function that gets enabled, despite there being plenty of other audiovisual cues. "CLOAK ENGAGED", "MAXIMUM ARMOR", it gets old fast.

           

Visuals:

     There was no way I was going to get through review of Crysis 2 without mentioning the graphics, given Crytek's reputation for demanding games that push the limits of visual fidelity, and as someone who's never played a Crytek game before I'm glad to say that their reputation is well deserved. At ultra graphics settings, this five year old game was more visually impressive, and looked more photo-realistic than any other game I've played to date. The sections of the game that take place in broad daylight look the best by far, with vivid colors, and the best looking light shafts and dynamic shadows stand out more than anywhere else in the game. The only area where there is a major drop in visual fidelity is during the FMV cutscenes. The video compression in them is some of the worst I've seen in a while, and looks about on-par with what I'd expect form a PS2 game. To see what I mean compare portrait of Hargreave in the first two screenshots at the beginning of this review, it's night and day. Fortunately the custscenes rarely last more than a minute and don't really affect the overall experience.

Technical Shit:

     Crysis 2 was able to hold 1080p, ultra settings at 60fps on my PC (i5-6600k, GTX 1060) for the vast majority of my play time, only dropping below that in a few instances that had lots of particle effects and real-time physics going on at the same time. Crysis 2 is however the buggiest game I've played in some time. None of the bugs I encountered were game breaking by any means, but I was surprised at how many of them there were considering that the game has had the last five years to get updates and bug fixes. To start with there were quite a few times where NPCs got stuck on the terrain and started glitching out, or sunk part way into the ground after death. The worst bug I encountered gameplay wise was once when I tried to swap my sniper rifle for another gun the sniper rifle didn't drop, and I had three weapons to cycle through instead of two, the gameplay problems caused by this fluke only became apparent after I ran out of sniper rifle ammo. I couldn't replenish ammo for the sniper rifle, nor could I swap it for another weapon, or pick up a second sniper rifle, and the problem persisted between level loads. This problem came to a head at an area where there was a good vantage point above a large crowd of enemies and a sniper rifle on the ground. Obviously I wasn't able to snipe most of the enemies as intended, so it took me way longer to get through that section than it should have. Fortunately the cutscene and scripted sequence that followed left me stripped of all my weapons, so problem solved.
     By far the strangest and most persistent bug I encountered during my play through of Crysis 2 occurred at random immediately after launching the game. I should point out that my gaming PC is hooked up to my TV in the living room because I prefer to play games on the big screen from my couch, and for whatever reason whenever I launched Crysis 2 the input signal going to the TV would briefly drop to 24 Hz before jumping back up to 60, but every so often, for no discernible reason it would stay stuck at 24 Hz, effectively capping the framerate at a headache inducing 24 FPS. Restarting the game or switching to windowed mode and back to fullscreen in the options would usually take care of it, but I still have no idea what actually caused the issue in the first place.

Wrap Up:

     Crysis 2 isn't a bad game, and there are far worse things you could waste eight hours of your life on. Most of the problems with Crysis 2 stem from the fact that it's just so generic as far as modern shooters go, even with the unique design choices and si-fi story elements that help it stand out from the crowd. The engagement curve was just too predictable for my tastes, and the last third of the campaign feels like the developers were on a tight deadline, so they used cheap, unsatisfying combat encounters to pad out the play time. In fact if it weren't for the final stretch of the campaign I probably would have rated Crysis 2 at least a little bit higher, and might even recommend it, because I really do like some of the more subtle design decisions it makes, especially in regards to upgrades and weapon mods, and the graphics are downright incredible, even five years later. I just wish those clever little design touches and amazing graphics had been in an overall better game.

Final Ratings:

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