by Okay. So it’s Crysis 2. A game where you get told you’re the manliest man to ever man the man, and you’re supposed go out there and be a man. And that’s okay? Why? Well, because there’s aliens, seismic catastrophes, explosions, more aliens, guns, skyscrapers being destroyed, tanks, more explosions and a cyber suit that turns you into a small god. If I’m going to jump the shark, I want to jump it hard. Screw realism.
So I mean, is this a good game? Well… er… no, not in the sense that karaoke night with your friends after about 2 pints too many is going to produce “good music.” But is it a “good game” in the sense that for the 15 or so hours that you slug your way through the campaign, you’re going to feel so hyped up on fake tension, false manliness and manufactured testosterone that you feel like you could walk up to Hercules himself, punch him in the face and take a dump on his lawn while he watches with no fear? Yes. Yes it is. Crysis 2 is amazingly, stupidly, amazing.
Mechanically speaking… it has some solid toys and abilities for you to play with (visor-vision, nano-vision, nano-armor, cloak, super strength), but the focus is much more on making you feel like things are epic, rather than really being epic. Every enemy in the game can be killed by pushing “Q” to become invincible, walking slowly up to their face, and unloading 10 rounds of your marshal into their alien brains. AI complexity is also… lacking. The last “boss” was 4 aliens that could cloak and take quite a beating. Unfortunately, the real challenge came not from fighting them but from trying to find their indefinitely invisible selves after they got clipped on a piece of the environment. After that, it was a matter of shooting 10 rounds of the marshall in their head… reloading 10 shells slowly while standing right in front of them… unloading 10 more rounds of the marshal into their head… reloading again… and… well, you get the picture.
The plot is also non-existent. It is comprised of getting a super-suit and being told “shoot everything that moves” (human or alien), getting passed around like a cheap prom date between 3 different political parties who all take turns telling you that they are the only ones you can trust before completely betraying you and proving that they are absolutely not the only one you can trust, and ending with a giant earth-shattering explosion that becomes meaningless once the original Prophet (guy from Crysis 1) tells you that the joke’s on you, because the Ceph are actually just freaking everywhere and your work has just started so… yeah, how’s that for closure.
In the end though… I just can’t say I didn’t love it. There’s a bit around the 50%–70% portion of the game where things feel like they drag just a bit too much, but that can be said of a lot of games. Frankly, the gratuitous explosions, high octane situations and endless amount of shooting aliens in the face made it easy to forget all the other shortcomings the game has, keeping it at Tier 1 for me.
