This is a review of the PC version of Crysis 2. The differences on the console are merely aesthetic and are hard to spot.

BACKSTORY

When Crytek released the original Crysis in 2007 it was touted as the most visually impressive video game ever created, it mostly was. The problem was and is that graphics do not make a great video game, game play (fun) will always be the highest measure of a video game’s success. Crysis had the most advanced graphics engine ever and many people struggled to obtain the best computer hardware available to play the game. Most found a competent shooter that combined the huge open structure of Crytek’s earlier ‘Far Cry’ with the nanosuit game play, which mixed up the standard shooter fare by giving the player “powers”.

Crysis was a shooter that let the player tackle huge open scenarios and challenged the player to use the nanosuit powers; strength, speed, armor and cloaking to overcome insurmountable odds. Fairly early into the game aliens were thrown into the mix and the player had to contend with an enemy far more mysterious and powerful than the standard military combatants. Crysis looked absolutely stunning and the game play was open and complex challenging the player to think outside of the corridor shooter norm. The game did have some major problems that held it back; you needed a supercomputer to run it, the story was garbage, the art style (save for the aliens) was weak, the games “levels” were far too open and unfocused and the games controls and mechanics were tricky for most.

Crytek has taken to every piece of critiscm to heart in creating Crysis 2.

The Story

Crysis 2 starts with a bang, literally thrown into the midst of an alien attack on New York City you play as a new faceless protagonist named private Alcatraz. Saved early on by a mysterious nanosuit-bearing warrior named Prophet (yes from the first one) you are given the suit and told ‘you are humanities last hope’. From there you will trek through the broken streets of New York City in search of identity and ultimately your role in a coming war. Alcatraz will be hunted not only by the alien invaders but also by the corporation responsible for the nanosuit’s creation Crynet systems. The story in Crysis 2 is a mixed bag, the core of the story while simple is effective and driving but its execution is anything but. The game’s story is told through Alcatraz’s perspective start to finish just like Half Life’s Gordon Freeman and this is a good thing, it allows the story to be experienced as in the old philosophy of “show don’t tell”.

The characters that are met throughout the campaign are flat and boring, with the exception of Prophet they are cliché and fed the worst script I have seen in a video game in some time. The story features segments where Alcatraz is being fed dialogue over a static map screen showing where his objective will take him, these segments in between levels need to go away before Crysis 3 hits. They are obtrusive and question the player’s intelligence (its a linear game after all, why should I be shown where the games taking me anyways?). The story in Crysis 2 while not perfect is better than the garbage featured in the original game and does set up a future installment quite nicely.