» Fri Jul 30, 2010 2:22 am The review system here includes two GTX 480 in SLI, a i7 920 @ 4.1 ghz, and a 2560x1600 monitor.
***GRAPHICS***
The graphics were one of the main strengths of the original game, and Crysis 2 has turned them into a weakness. There are NO configuration options, just preset settings, and you can only choose from "High," "Very High," and "Extreme." Unfortunately, Extreme looks significantly worse than Crysis and Warhead. Protip for Crytek: calling your graphics "extreme" doesn't make them look any better. As far as I can tell there is no way to force Anti-Aliasing on, and instead Crysis 2 uses its own form of edge blurring that looks terrible compared to true AA. The edge AA was fine in Crysis because the vegetation benefited from it more than traditional AA and it provided a performance boost, but Crysis 2 consists of mostly buildings and straight edges that require traditional AA to look their best.
There are three main pillars to the graphical failings.
----The textures are a major downgrade. It's true that the original Crysis had the occasional blurry rock texture, but most of them were flat out amazing. Crysis 2 throws all that away and replaces them with textures that are very flat and low resolution, failing to make effective use of ambient occlusion like the original game did. The textures now look closer to what you'll find in the very dated looking Call of Duty games than the original Crysis.
----The visual effects are a major downgrade. Crysis 2 shipped as a DirectX9 game, whereas the original Crysis was built in DirectX 10 and it shows. The explosions, motion blur, and particle effects were of amazing quality in Crysis and judiciously used, but on the other hand Crysis 2 tries to obscure the lower quality effects by using them excessively. The motion blur and bloom lighting in Crysis 2 are absolutely out of control. In Crysis, the motion blur was used to good effect by making a demanding game run a bit smoother and also making flying objects look great when they passed in front of you. Crysis 2 is not a demanding game, and rather than using high quality blur on objects for the wow factor, it slathers low quality blur over every inch of the screen when you turn to distract you from the rest of the graphics. I could go down the list point by point listing things like water effects, SSAO, lower godrays count, etc and explaining how they are downgraded in Crysis 2, but that would make the review run too long.
----The environments are a major downgrade. Crysis featured complex, wide open jungle environment with a lot of destructibility and interactivity, and amazing shadows casted by all of the plants. When you blew something up, the explosions would ripple through the tree leaves, shaking them. Crysis 2 throws all of that away in favor of a city environment that features a much lower draw distance, much lower polygon count, and far fewer shadows. The environments of Crysis 2 are very small and restrictive, with minimal opportunities to explore or deviate from the set path.
Aside from the three key complaints above, the config files are locked which will come as a huge dissapointment to Crysis fans. The config culture of the original Crysis was a blast, with the different looks you could give the game providing reason to revisit it. In short, Crysis 2 looks worse than the aging Crysis, and roughly in line with the average recent PC release. It does look nice in screenshots, but play it on a large monitor and you'll see that many assets are of shockingly low quality.
***STORY***
I will not say much about the story of Crysis 2 because I do not want to spoil it (***original Crysis spoilers incoming***). However, know that while Crysis 1 featured an epic cliffhanger ending with NOMAD and Prophet returning to the nuked island to continue the fight, Crysis 2 throws all of that away to go with a different main character and different setting. This was a huge mistake and a slap in the face to Crysis fans, and was probably done because Crytek wanted to cater to the console gamers who did not play Crysis by giving them a fresh start and rebooted plot.
***GAMEPLAY***
The gameplay also features huge concessions caused by the console-centric development. Almost immediately, you will notice that game-saves have been removed in favor of a console-style checkpoint system. This is bad because Crytek doesn't do a good job of spacing its checkpoints. There have been times where I have cleared an area of enemies, received a radio transmission and new objective, then moved on to a new area only to die and be put back at the *very* start of all that. Most games would put a checkpoint after you've completed an objective, but Crysis 2 often doesn't, which is quite annoying in a game that has more than its fair share of cheap deaths.
The levels have been vastly decreased in size as well as enemy count, taking away the sandbox feel. Crysis 2 now plays like your typical on-rails, scripted, Call of Duty game. The enemy soldiers you fight are now generic and *ultra-serious*, a far cry from the humor of stalking the hapless and hilarious North Koreans of the original Crysis through the jungle. Vehicles also fall by the wayside and are used much less even though the strategic options they offered were a strength of the original Crysis. Think you're going to hop in an APC and mow enemies down with the turret like you did with Crysis 1 jeeps? Think again, you'll be ripped to shreds by enemies in a matter of seconds because they are extremely accurate even over long distances.
The opening of the game is hugely consolized to the point that it's an embarrassment. You watch video cutscene after video cutscene and then are thrown into an on-rails tutorial level where the nanosuit stops you every 3 seconds to troll for its various features. When I finally got to control my character and saw that SLI wasn't working, exiting out of the game to fix it and then restarting made me rewatch the unskippable cutscenes. By contrast, in Crysis you jump out of a plane and get to start playing, and it is a real level rather than the obligatory "tutorial level" common to console games.
The nanosuit has also seen some huge downgrades to make it easier to use with an Xbox 360 controller. Speed mode and strength mode are no longer selectable. Instead, they automatically kick in when you run or jump. This is a huge design flaw, because there will be many occasions where you want to run without draining your suit power and you can no longer do that. Even worse, the "speed" running in Crysis 2 is barely faster than normal running in Crysis 1. Any time you want to move faster than a walk, you are draining your armor. The armor mode is no longer the default suit mode when you run out of energy and need to replenish. Instead, all suit modes are turned off, and in fact when armor mode is turned on it drains your energy even if you aren't taking damage. This makes the main character of Crysis 2 much weaker than NOMAD and Psycho, and that combined with the tiny environments means even someone who mastered Crysis will get mauled in this game on the harder difficulties. The enemies have solid AI, but they are prone to glitches and can sometimes see you through walls and cover when they should not have line of sight. The only real improvement in Crysis 2 is that you can now pull yourself up on to ledges, which is a welcome addition. Another new feature is that holding the right mouse button when near the edge of a wall or crouched behind a barrier will allow you to peek out and shoot. For some reason it does not work with the vast majority of the environment though, so it can't be relied on and you'll quickly learn to ignore it.
To "compensate" for the many downgrades, Crysis features the timeless console trope of Collectible Dogtags! Because collectable dogtags were what we all wanted and not DX11, tweakable graphics, sandbox gameplay, and a true sequel to Crysis.
***MULTIPLAYER***
I saved the multiplayer for last because I did not play it in the original Crysis and have only played it in the demo of Crysis 2. There is not much to say about it though. It features small maps, low player counts, Call of Duty style killstreaks, matchmaking lobbies rather than dedicated servers, and rampant hacking. You already know if that type of game interests you or not. Assuming you aren't in the target audience for this, I would suggest the excellent Battlefield Bad Company 2.
***BUGS***
Crysis 2 is not a broken game, but there are many embarrassing bugs that should have never passed QA. With moderate frequency, dying and reloading a checkpoint will disable your melee attacks entirely, causing nothing to happen when you press the melee button. The only way to fix this is quitting the game and restarting. I have also seen this bug reported by several others. Several times, the crosshairs of my gun scope have disappeared entirely, possibly caused by reloading checkpoints or alt-tabbing. Again, this can only be fixed by restarting the game as far as I know. Lastly, my gun disappeared entirely once, although switching weapons restored it.
***CONCLUSION***
If Crysis 2 had been marketed under a different name or was a totally new IP, I might have been able to give it two stars. It is at its core a below average and utterly forgettable FPS. However, Crysis 2 is not a random game, it is the sequel to Crysis, and must be judged in comparison to the original. As a sequel to Crysis, it fails spectacularly, offering massive downgrades and concessions to cater to consoles rather than improvements to the original. In short, Crysis fans now have their Command & Conquer 4. Amazon describes the criteria for one star reviews as "I hate it," and boy do I hate both this game and everything it represents to dedicated PC gaming.
~by some guy at Amazon.com
PS: Take a note Crytek. Please don't pull this **** off with Crysis 3.
By now you have more than enough money to create a real PC game and redeem yourselves from this fiasco.
