It hurts to see you in this way. Your pride, your plans for the future, your magnificence. All of it seems lost. What happened to you? How could you ever let it come to this? It hurts to see you in this state, my true friend… New York City.
The mother of all cities forms the battlefield in Crysis 2. It’s a cruel war, a war between the human race and the Ceph. It’s weird to say but sometimes war can be something beautiful, destructive but yet beautiful. This I often realized during my stay in this virtual replica of NYC. The city really came to live thanks to the many beautiful details the creators put in this game. You could see the garbage in the streets, the water leaking from the sewers, the gorgeous explosions, the realistic facial expressions… Everything seemed just right. Only one question remains: ‘are the game mechanics as impressive as the graphics?’
To make it short, yes, behind all the beautiful graphics you’ll find a great game. To start with the singleplayer, this gamemode is very well created and won’t be finished in just a couple of hours, a trend that other modern shooters on the other hand seem to like. With Crysis 2 it’s really different; you’ll get a full experience including Hollywood-like scenes and a lot of action. Crytex really tried to make the perfect singleplayer game, but they didn’t fully achieve their goal.
Don’t get me wrong. The game sure gives you a memorable game thanks to the battles and plot twist but there was still something missing. Something important that would have made Crysis 2 almost perfect. The thing that was missing was the story. Although Crytex tried their very best to make the story as appealing as possible, the story could often serve you a couple of wtf’s. The story throughout the game isn’t always that clear. Sometimes I just felt used by one person after the other and unsure what I was doing. The goal you needed to achieve to complete the game wasn’t always that clear thanks to the confusing storyline. This problem could have been solved easily by just adding some more structure to the story.
Lucky for us, a game is more than just a good story, next to the story it’s the gameplay that’s very important. In this area, Crysis 2 scores very well. The gameplay is really fluent and keeps you going just until the very end. In crysis 2 it’s still all about the incredible Nanosuit. This suit straight from the future gives you a couple of abilities soldiers could only dream of. You can jump very high, survive a fall from great height, can become stronger by turning on your armour and you even can become invisible for enemies thanks to the cloak. It are these abilities that determine the way you’ll play this game. Would you like to kill your enemies like Rambo? Use your armour. Or would you prefer to sneak around and be a silent assassin? Use your cloak. Each mission can be played in a complete different way thanks to this nanosuit. You can either run into a bunch of enemies and kill them all by using your guns but you can also eliminate alien by alien with the use of your knife. The choice is up to you.
The game also gives you the variation you would expect from a shooter nowadays. You’ll have a wide range of weapons at your disposal and the environment differs enough to make the game interesting. Sometime you can even make use of some army vehicles; this can only make the game better.
The only drawback are the many bugs in the game. Although the CryEngine 3 seems to be a very powerful engine, it couldn’t escape the bugs. Enemies that walk through glass and die, floating corpses, textures that won’t load immediately and the AI form the enemies can sometimes be very questionable. This sounds very negative but in the end Crysis 2 remains one of the best shooter you can buy on your console.
Multiplayer:
A shooter won’t be a shooter without a multiplayer. Crytek didn’t neglect this and made a very solid multiplayer experience. First off, the maps all look absolutely gorgeous and offer enough possibilities to hide yourself or the fight side by side. The locations are directly imported form the singleplayer and are easy to recognize for the players.
The balance starts out just fine. Rookies won’t be able to fight higher ranked players but have to continue fighting other rookies until they reach level 10. This is a great way to learn the basics so that you’ll be able to survive against human players. It’s a bit of shame that after level 10, everybody can compete against each other. So a level 10 player can play against a level 50 player. This isn’t always fair because the higher the level, the more powerful the skills.
Just as any modern multiplayer, Crysis 2 offers a deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, protect the base, and more gametypes. Crysis 2 also uses Killstreaks that you can activate new weapons and abilities after collecting a number of dogtags. You can also play different classes like assault and sniper but you can also create a custom class.
The dog tags however, deserve a bit more attention. You can collect a dog tag by killing an enemy and sweep the dog tag off of the ground. The fun part is that you can see who you just killed. You’ll see his/her gamertag but also his/her country of origin. It’s just a little extra but it makes the experience so much better.
