Better late than never, I’m on a mission to complete every game I’ve either missed or started before the end of the year, the first game I’ve ticked off the list is Crysis 2. I’m a big fan of the first Crysis, it’s a game I’ve completed multiple times over the years since its release in 2007. The gameplay matured with future playthroughs as much as the graphics did with subsequent upgrades. It’s a game I often look back on as one of the better singleplayer campaigns of this generation. Importantly where Crysis excels is in giving the player freedom, there’s never a time where you’re told to ‘follow’. The player dictates the pace and direction of the action within small pockets of sandbox level design. It’s a framework that Crytek have worked with since Far Cry and it’s still as refreshing now as it was back in 2004, perhaps even more so now.

It’s a bit of a shame then that Crysis 2 relies so heavily on spectacle that the gameplay moments which make it good are out weighed by being asked to press Y to ‘look’, at least it would be a shame if the spectacle was any less incredible. There isn’t a game out there that shows destruction at this scale and fidelity so consistently and so often throughout at a 10 + hour campaign. Modern Warfare 2 does half of the bombast that Crysis 2 dishes out within its 4 hour campaign and Crysis 2 manages to do this while still maintaining some of that emergent, free-form gameplay that doesn’t rely on that damned ‘follow’ sign.

The setting is New York and aliens have invaded, you play as a faceless marine who at the very beginning of the game gets transplanted into a Nano Suit. Half dead and broken, the suit repairs your injuries by symbiotically linking with you, granting powers of speed, strength, armour and invisibility. It’s all insane sci-fi made up with parts of The Fly, Cloverfield, Power Rangers and Predator as inspiration. Crysis 1 started off with an air of realism to it and gradually descends into fantasy madness, Crysis 2 however hits the floor running saying ‘Shits fucked up, you’re fucked up, let’s fuck things up and then GTFO!’ Which is exactly how the campaign proceeds; after an hour or so of a beautifully subtle tutorial the game stops holding your hand for a while to play about with the various powers on offer. This is a game designed for a gamepad no doubt, the powers are mapped beautifully to two shoulder buttons meaning that your movement and aiming is never interrupted meaning you can shift powers while maintaining momentum making you feel like a bit of a cyborg ninja.

It’s at about the mid-point of the campaign where shit just goes off, aliens are featured as the dominant foe and the fire-power is exponentially increased. Buildings are thrown around like paper, bridges collapse while you’re running across them, giant tripod robots demolish everything in their path, all while there are VTOLS and alien troop ships fighting it off in the sky. The level design remains open allowing you to dart from back streets, up through buildings, onto main streets and down into sewers. Helping the player make sense of the chaos is an always accessible waypoint system built into binoculars which highlight different suggested routes through combat zones, the waypoints will often show you a good place for flanking, stealth, resupplying or sniping. The system works really well to show those who arn’t already versed in the way Crytek communicate their gameplay design, effective ways of playing.

There are several problems with the campaign though, as with a lot of big budget games these days the story is oddly convoluted. Where Cloverfield, District 9, Half Life 2 and even Bad Company 2 spent time building up characters to empathise with and used them to tell a simple story which escalates into insane violence and spectacle; Crysis 2 spends no time developing characters only to rely on spectacle to carry the strength of its convoluted plot. The moments when this works is when the game isn’t speaking to you and you’re free to shoot things on your own terms, where it fails is when you’re forced to do tasks or go places in order to forward a story or interact with a character you don’t care about. All of the cutscenes are tedious because of this, there’s one moment early on in the game where you have to rescue this hippy scientist who proceeds to explain as much of the plot to you as possible while you are locked in a small room unable to do anything other than walk in circles. Sure Half Life 2 is guilty of this also but, that was 2004 man!

I refuse to forgive these big budget FPS games for assuming narrative and story is less important than a building falling down, though there is one thread which I like and that’s the slow deterioration of the player character, he gets beaten to near death at multiple points in the game to the point where he’s more or less a corpse in a robot suit. It’s very dark and I think if this game was written by a Japanese studio that they would have made this dark element the focus of the plot.

Multiplayer is like Call of Duty: Cyborg Ninja, it plays very familiarly but it has this neat twist where everyone is a superhero. There’s a plethora of upgrades and guns to unlock as you level up some of which seem so powerful that they surely must unbalance the game. I was enjoying the multiplayer up until it became infested with cheaters who could see through walls and auto target, it’s apparant that if you see someone killing you in the kill cam and instantly snap 180 degrees to a different target that something is going on so I gave up on it.

Regardless of the faults of the game I think it presents a campaign that’s bigger, better and less insulting of ones intelligence than that of Call of Duty and Battlefield 3. I think its graphical fidelity is unmatched and artistically provides some powerful imagery of human decimation. I don’t think the game is as clever or suprising as Crysis 1 and the game is disappointingly derivative, but the spectacle is amazing. It’s on a destructive scale I don’t think any other game has reached and it still gives the player a good amount of freedom.

[7]