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Mike
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« Reply #746 on: April 03, 2011, 11:36:11 AM » |
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Crysis 2. And it's actually kind of disappointing.
The 1st game is still about the prettiest game ever made. You start out fighting a North Korean general on a Pacific island, who accidentally wakes up ancient aliens, and then everything gets crazy. The big thing that made Crysis unique was that you wore a nanotechnology super suit that gave you super speed, strength, armor, and could turn invisible.
Then, the developers, Crytek, said they wanted to make a console game instead of a PC exclusive. So now it's kind of like Call of Crysis. It's not awful, but I like certain things about the first game better.
In this one, you're in New York, which is being torn apart by the aliens and a virus that came from...somewhere. You play Alcatraz, a Marine sent in to help fight the aliens who proceeds to get his ass kicked and ends up with a Nanosuit somehow.
The suit powers are different now, instead of having separate strength/speed/armor modes, there's a "power" mode that is on all the time and lets you super jump or use strength whenever you need it. The sprint sucks now, though. You don't go crazyfast, you actually go the same speed as sprinting in Armor mode, except it drains your suit's power.
The armor mode is different now, too. Instead of being the "default" mode that only uses energy when you take damage, you now have to activate it and it continuously drains power. The health system is different too, instead of having a bar that regenerates like the first game, it uses the Modern Warfare "the more damage you take, the more strawberry jam is thrown on the screen". It's really abrupt, too. You take a few hits, everything is fine, you take a few more, and everything is red, you can't see, and it says HEALTH CRITICAL at the bottom. And then you die because you forgot that armor has to be turned on, now.
There's a lot of levels, but they all seem really short. Instead of being set on a lush, jungle island, it is now in New York in ruins. A big appeal of the first game was that you could explore and find a ton of different ways through a situation. Now, there's a scan mode that is basically hand holding, and it becomes very repetitive: Exit a tunnel, spy a few guys from the bottom, and icons show up that say "snipe from this place, sneak through that place, pick up ammo here". That gets repeated 3 or 4 times, and then you go on to the next level.
The levels themselves aren't anywhere near as expansive as the first game. Sure, it's a huge city, but most of it is walled off except for the one path you can take. And I also lived in Manhattan for 4 years, so I'm kind of a snob when it comes to NY being portrayed in video games, but I feel like they half-assed it. There's the same few buildings repeated over and over, every street corner has the same 3 stores, and I swear that I fought through almost the exact same plaza in 2 completely different levels. It seems like the developers have never actually been to NY, and just worked from a bunch of postcards of the place.
The levels also seem totally disjointed. For example, you finish one level in the street, and then when you start the next one, you're halfway up a smashed building. All I could think was "there must have been an awesome firefight to get there, that they skipped." But nope, you just start there.
They also added a lot of Call of Duty-style set pieces, but CoD does it better. Some of them take a long time to play out, for instance one part where your suit malfunctions and the aliens kick the crap out of a bunch of soldiers. It's a solid couple of minutes where you do nothing but lay on the ground, watching stuff happen.
There's also a lot of really annoying things about the combat, that make the game seem unfinished. First off, everything you do seems very slow. Changing weapons takes forever: Hit the button, wait a couple of seconds, THEN you change guns. Same with reloading, you don't actually reload sometimes for about a second after you hit the key. You can still grab and choke enemies, but it usually gets you killed because of how long it takes: hit the key, wait a couple seconds, then grab the guy, then there's an animation for a few seconds where you choke him, then you hit the trigger to throw the guy, but nothing happens for a few seconds. And all the while, you're being turned into Swiss cheese by everyone else in the map.
Finally, the whole internet has been bitching about the graphics. They certainly are very pretty, yes, but it doesn't look quite as unbelievable as the first game. It runs on directx9, while the first game, in 2007, ran on directx 10. Crytek says they will have support for dx11 (the newest one) in a patch, but really? You purposely put out an unfinished product?
In the first game, there were plenty of places for you to stop and take in the scenery, but now, it feels like you're rushed through every level. Each level also is much, much shorter than before, and getting a loading screen every 15 or 20 minutes instead of every hour makes the whole game feel like a rush, too.
Anyway, that was a shitload of words. Crysis 2 is a good game, not crappy, but not as groundbreaking as the original Crysis. I haven't tried the multiplayer yet, but my friend told me that it is currently ruined by hackers, so I'm going to give it a while yet.
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