Crysis 2 Review

Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: FPS

What's the first thing that comes into your mind when you hear Crysis ? A earthquake, starvation, economical breakdown, terrorists or a tsunami ? Well in a gamers mind a tropical paradise full of vegetation and life that looks and feels as real as is gets is getting shape. Also names like Nomad and Prophet pop up. Take the above mentioned place, throw some vehicles, make it (almost) fully destructible and you got one of the best FPS's launched in a long time.

Now with Crysis 2 you might be expecting to return to the said paradise and ... maybe fill out the missing gaps in the story. Well ... no. The game takes you to another jungle, this time made out of concrete. I'm talking about the always busy New York. You start the game as a US Marine, named Alcatraz minutes before his death. After getting hold of a nanosuit (which saves his life) you start roaming around the streets of the city killing Ceph (the aliens) and soldiers (of course, humans to kill each other even when the Earth is attacked). On your pointA-to-pointB journey you will meet some interesting characters (some that want to help you, some that want you dead).

Although New York looks impresive (thanks to the new cry engine) it lacks the free-roaming from the previous games. You don't have the same freedom to build up a strategy on how to pass a group of enemies. Yes there are side-streets, subway entrances and you can jump on buildings (or jump down for that matter) but it's just not the same. Also this renders the vehicles provided totally useless and one of my favorite things in Crysis was to drive around the place.

The runs pretty smooth on the Xbox although in some cases it stutters a bit and sometimes you can see things just appear meters in front of you. Also I really liked the fire in the game and light effects (there are a lot of lights, explosions, stuff like like that). The weird thing is that when you throw a object ... Alcatraz moves his arms forward and it takes one extra second until he let's go of the object (I also noticed this in the previous Crysis games).

After killing Ceph you can "harvest" their bodies for resources that you can use to upgrade your suit. These upgrades vary from stealth-bonuses to running consuming less energy and so on. You still have the ability to cloak yourself or enhance the suits armor but you have to be careful because everything (like running, jumping) will deplete your energy bar and you can accidentaly de-cloak yourself in the worst moment possible. Just like these suit upgrades, you can modify your weapons with parts that you had on previous death-sharing-devices. You also have a nanovision (some sort of infrared or something) and the ability to look at a zone and mark weapon caches or enemies. While in stealth you can quick-kill your enemies or if you get close to them you can grab-and-throw them.

The only weird thing in the game is that the AI isn't always there. Sometimes I would just sit behind this tree or something and the enemies came one a time in the same spot. I also encountered a situation when i was sitting right besides a enemy and we would just look at me ... eventually crouching or running back-and-forth.

The game has a pretty lengthy campaign full of surprises and plot-twists, it looks and feels brilliant but the thing it lacks the most are boss-fight ... there are none. Also there are plenty of collectibles to make you replay the game a lot of times. There are New York souvenirs, dog-tags, car keys and email conversations.

the bad: the AI 
the good: graphics, you can go stealthy or just gun everyone down