Crysis 2 campaign review

By BatRastered — March 31, 2011
Tags: crysis-2 crytek-frankfurt ea review

A decent length campaign with some truly awesome moments is marred by some terrible AI.

Crysis 2 has an interesting campaign, if you can get past the bordom of the first few levels, that is. I spent about 14 hours in the campaign, that's a pretty good length by today's standards. Certainly, you're not getting cheated like Modern Warfare 2's ridiculously short story. The story takes place on a Manhattan island that has been devistated by a plague. Little do they know, that this disaster was casued by aliens.

While I had a great time in the later levels fighting against the "Ceph" aliens, the game starts you off fighting against a private military corporation known as the "Cell". I guess they were in charge of evacuating the city or something, but I was never really sure as to why they wanted to kill me. I mean, I'm trying to save the world! I guess somebody wanted my suit? Whatever. Fighting the Cell is 50% boring and 50% terrible, glitchy AI. If they catch a glimpse of you, they start shooting, but if you're far enough away when this happens, you can just cloak and they often go back to doing what they were doing as if nothing happened. Reall good security force there, Jimmy! The dialouge they spew is equally buggy. Once, I stealth killed a Cell soldier, and one of his buddies heard it and went to investigate. I cloaked and waited for him to show up. Upon standing over his friend's corpse, he quips "must've been a false alarm." Huh?

Once the Ceph start to show up, you're in for some real action. They jump off walls and up onto roof tops to flank you and, of course, take more that a bullet or two to bring down. Unfortunately, I was a good 5 hours into the game before the good stuff happened. In fact, the demo level we saw at E3 2010 was from the second to last level of the game. Really? Really! Still, fighting a walking alien tank while being hounded by many Ceph ground troops is a lot of fun and a good challenge. Interestingly, after wiping out a large chunk of the Ceph offensive, I'm back fighting Cell again, trying to rescue someone from them and they're hell-bent on killing me again... as if I didn't just save all their asses... Yeah, the story is a little convoluted.

The graphics and sound of Crysis 2 are top-notch. I played on an XBOX 360 (in HD, but not 3D) and thought the game looked spectacular. Even better considering I didn't have to install anything to get up and running. Just pop in the disk and go. The draw distance in Crysis 2 is really incredible, which allows the sniper rifle to be very useful in many situations. The orchestral musical score, while not quite Halo standards for me, was quite good and added to the overall experience. The suit itself talks to you, telling you when you cloak or armor are turned on. This is ok at first, but it gets tiresome since those modes consume energy, you can't just leave them on which means you end up hearing that a lot. The controls are typical for a console FPS, with the addition of the shoulder buttons controlling your armor and cloak abilities and never got in the way of the action, although sometimes when close to an object I couldn't jump the way I wanted to. For some reason, the game continues to tell you how to crawl under things even towards the end of the game, I found no way to turn the hints off.

I didn't play much of the multi-player, though what I did see felt a lot like CoD style, which I hate. See goukijones' MP review later. The campaign itself has no real reason to go back and do it again. In fact, it feels a bit like Halo 2, giving you that "hey we're working on part 3" moment at the end.

Good:

An FPS with a campaign that actually lasts more than one play session.
Interesting fights with the alien "Ceph".
The nano-suit is great and makes you feel like a badass.
Upgrading the suit and swapping weapon parts (scopes, silencers, etc) doesn't pause the game or take you out of the environment at all.
Most of the story is told in the game engine without taking you out of first-person.
Controls are spot-on. Shooting feels right.
Looks great. Sounds great.

Bad:

Multi-player feels like CoD. You have to rank up to get better guns, which is hard when people you play against already have them.
Fights against human "Cell" group are boring, plagued by terrible AI and audio bugs, and just don't make sense.
Enemy path finding is often broken, leaving bad guys stuck between objects or facing a wall.
Too much hand-holding by the game. Press B to crouch is useful in level one, just plain annoying in level 18.
The suit won't shut up. I hope you like hearing "cloak engaged", or "maximum armor", or "nano vision enabled", because you'll hear it a lot.
No replay value to the campaign.

If you're into the CoD style multiplayer, you might enjoy the overall experience of this game more than I did.

Overall: Rent it

Crysis 2

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Release Date: Mar 22, 2011

Buy it! 33% - Rent it! 47% - Flush it! 20%

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Crysis 2 campaign review

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