"Crysis 2" delivers a welcome antithesis to the cavalcade of copycat shooters. With a core of dedicated PC fans that demand technical excellence and a curious console community, the expectations for the title were quite high. Developer Crytek wisely sticks to the traits that made the first game successful while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of graphical fidelity.
The "Crysis 2" plot is self-contained enough that you won't be missing much if this is your first experience. Players take the role of a Marine named Alcatraz who, due to circumstances beyond his control, ends up donning a nanosuit that gives him super speed, strength, armor, and stealth capabilities. With an airborne disease plaguing New York City and an alien uprising destroying the capital of the world, Alcatraz must track down a researcher who may have knowledge of how to squelch the invasion.
The nanosuit makes Alcatraz's load much easier to carry. Crytek deftly mapped the suit's abilities onto the gamepad without sacrificing traditional shooter controls, giving you cloaking, armor and tactical assessment skills at the touch of a button. The gunplay handles as smoothly as the best shooters in the business, and the frequent weapon drops allow you to experiment with new toys without worrying about losing your preferred gun for good. The team also implemented a useful first-person cover and lean system.
In terms of level design, the game takes its cues from the streamlined approach Crytek adopted for "Crysis Warhead." The decimated buildings and barricaded streets give the action a more enclosed feeling than the expansive open worlds of "Far Cry" and the original "Crysis," but the environments are still large and varied enough to give players the freedom to wage war against the above average enemy AI with a tactic of their choosing.
Rather than force players into a series of predicable fights with predetermined weapons, Crytek creates sandbox battle scenarios and allows each player to adopt his or her own preferred approach. You often enter the battle arena at a vantage point just out of sight. This gives strategic players the option of marking all the targets in the area so they don't encounter many surprises once they open fire.
From here, how you confront the overwhelming odds is up to you. You can stay in stealth mode to pick off enemies one by one, adopt a hit-and-run strategy by jumping in and out of stealth to recalibrate your approach after each kill, activate power armor for a frontal assault, or snipe enemies from perches present in most scenarios.
The battles and set piece moments intensify as the game progresses. I wish I could say the same for the narrative. Alcatraz may as well be a robot, and most of the characters you encounter similarly lack depth. This is a shame. As with the campaign, the nanosuit is the great differentiator. Crytek UK balanced the suit's abilities well and created a smart system of persistent enhancements that players earn by using the suit's power, armor and stealth abilities during battle.
With 12 maps ripped from the campaign, 50 rankings, medals and customizable kits, "Crysis 2" makes a strong case for becoming a destination multiplayer mode. The one major criticism I can levy is that Crytek locks the more creative game modes. You won't have all the modes unlocked until level 39, which seems needlessly buried in a game that doesn't have a large community behind it that is guaranteed to keep playing for the 15-plus hours necessary to access all the options.
