Suit yourself
Providing a superhuman edge in combat, the nanosuit returns as the star of the show. Nominally changed from Crysis and Warhead, the neo-military fetishwear offers the familiar and entertaining sandbox toolset of speed, strength, armour and cloaking to complement the game's near-future weaponry. It's a toolset that offers a wealth of opportunity to individualise play, but it also means you have to challenge yourself to get the most out of the game.
Out on the tiles
On all but Supersoldier difficulty, the nanosuit proves too omnipotent. With a significantly shorter cooldown period than Crysis, cloaking is too readily overused. Stripped of the dense jungle camouflage, enemies are at a distinct disadvantage amid New York's open spaces. And augmented powers – harvested from dead aliens – are utterly superfluous before the final third of the game, when alien numbers and types finally present a challenge worthy of the nanosuit – none more so than Pingers, intimidating tripods that make Half Life 2's Striders seem like fluffy, three-legged bunny rabbits.
Even on Supersoldier, Crysis 2's campaign is far easier than Halo and Call of Duty's toughest difficulty settings. But it still manages to provide sufficient challenge to stretch out play to a satisfying 14 hours.
Fading fast
Despite a rather pedestrian opening few hours, the excellent popcorn narrative and open-world punctuated by intense action bubbles, carries you through the game as it proceeds towards a thrilling crescendo.
Next page: Human resources
COMMENTS
This week's epic comment fail
CLEARLY Killzone 3 is better.
Obviously.
In your own mind.
Some people still struggling with the concept of opinions, apparently. Still, I'm sure that massive company Sony are glad you're sticking up for them and their mass produced products against those mean reviewers.
Try to understand that while you like Killzone 3, someone else may not be as enamoured. Or, like a simpleton, you could continue to argue with anyone who doesn't give [latest AAA game] a score you think it deserves, as though that somehow impacts upon your enjoyment.
A huge let-down
The joy of Far-Cry (and to a lesser degree Crysis) was the large-scale maps and relative freedom in tackling them - you really could play some levels several times and have a very different experience each time. I pre-bought Crysis 2 because I was hoping for, nay expecting, a similar level of freedom only this time in an urban setting. It's 2011 after all, it seemed reasonable to expect to be able to smash into any building, go onto roof-tops when I felt like it and generally make my own path to the required point on the map - you ARE playing a bloke in a powered armour suit after all.
What I got was a remake of the City17 bits of Half-life 2 with nicer textures, inferior story-telling and the oh-for-pity's-sake-this-isn't-a-game-it's-a-barely-interactive-movie quality of COD4. I've also encountered an apparent scripting issue in the game where, after defending a location against a horde of nasties, nothing else happened and the friendly NPCs wandered around the battlezone for several minutes until I gave up and quit.
Oh well. Serves me right for pre-ordering, I won't do that again.
blatant sony staff
Are Sony still paying people to come on forums and slate everything that isnt Sony related? I thought THAT fad died out in 2007...
Enjoyable but nothing great
A few points that didn't get mentioned since I don't care for consoles this ofcourse reffer to the real platform to enjoy fps games on.
Graphics: While the graphics are ok, they don't impress like farcry or crysis did. The environments while ok are not anything special, and some of the nature parts seems to be a bit low on the polygon count. There is also a strang omittment in that the game has no builtin advanced settings but only resolution and a high mid low kindof setting though a bit of googling turned up a application that allows you to change the settings as you please .
Controls: The controls work decently well and are not useless as many console ports are.
AI: Pretty useless.
Now onto the important stuff
Gear: There are two kinds of hardware in the game, weapons and the suit, let's start with the suit.
As in Crysis stealth is the name of the game most of the time, once in a while armor is also helpful, but stealth is what will see you through most of the game. The suit can be upgraded with enhanced abilities in four categories with three different options availible in each, unfortunately they have very different usefulness for the singleplayer campaign (the multiplayer upgrades are a bit different) it's also somewhat annoying that the cost for the different upgrades vary so much that you in reality have very limited choice on what upgrades to use until very late in the game. Overall though the suit feels a bit more pollished then it did in it's first incarnation.
Weapons: The weapons in the game are a decent collection, but somehow I miss some decent firepower upgrades it seems like I prefered to use the same weapons all the way through the game with a upgrade from assaultrifle to machinegun as soon as I get my hands on one. There are two hightech experimental weapons in the game that you can pick up at a couple of places, while good they suffer from not having amunition availible to replenish the initial loadout which limits the usefulness.
Gameplay: While you usualy can do things a couple of different ways it feels like you are mostly firmly atatched to the railroad tracks and are not allowed to deviate. While taking place in new york you realy have no way to move around like farcry or even crysis allowed you to do. The aliens come in three varities standard cannonfodder annoying cannonfodder and annoying amunition sinks. One strange thing is that while storywise the same aliens as in crysis they have apparently changed equipment since they bear no resemblance to the flying squids etc in Crysis.
From a leveldessign standpoint it's a clear move back from it's predecessors andshow little if any innovation.
Is it fun: The game is decently entertaining and the story is not bad, though I can't shake the feeling that I spend to much time falling from high places or drowning. or a combination of the two.
Seconded!
I just completed the game about 10 minutes before the timestamp of this post, and I have to say Horridbloke nailed it on the head, the game is visually stunning but lacks the gameplay elements that should come with being a total bad-ass super soldier. You feel boxed into linear gameplay and the story fails to hook you in. Nuff said.
