Crysis 2 Review

Written 4/10/2011

Note: This review is for the PC version of the game. Screenshot and video taken from my machine.

I don’t think any self-respecting PC gamer neglected to have the original Crysis on their radar when it was initially released, and even some time afterward. It was beautiful, had a pretty good story, and some very unique gameplay opportunities. It was also the benchmark for how powerful your PC really was for at least a good three years. Now Crytek seeks to torture our PCs (and consoles now too) yet again with Crysis 2. Aside from the beauty, can it even hold a candle to the original?

Visuals and Presentation

Crysis 2 is built on Crytek’s new CryEngine 3, so you can expect the game to look a great deal more amazing than the original Crysis. I was actually surprised that the game looked so good without having any DirectX 11 functionality available, but Crytek assures that there will be a patch that adds DirectX 11 options to the game. Weapon and character models, as well as animations are all equally improved, but the real star here is the environment. The entire game takes place in New York City, and it’s looking worse for wear due to the constant fighting that’s been going on. The streets are mostly abandoned, buildings are crumbling, and a strong sense of emptiness permeates the entire city. It’s a chilling and serene scene to behold, and it almost startles you when you come across any sign of military or alien presences that begin opening fire on you. The game also improves visually as you progress through the campaign, so there’s never a shortage of “Wow, look at that!” moments. My only minor complaint is that the bloom effects in the game can be pretty overpowering at times. I didn’t mind it, but I’m sure some of you will absolutely hate it. It just depends.

The multiplayer maps that I was able to see (more on that in the Gameplay section) are all equally stunning. It doesn’t appear as though any of the major visual bells and whistles were removed to improve gameplay, which is very impressive in itself. There’s no performance hit in the multiplayer maps, even though they look almost exactly like their campaign counterparts. As I said in my demo impressions of the game, Crytek must have used a similar black magic to what Valve did in putting so many enemies on screen with the Left 4 Dead games.

Visuals and Presentation Rating:

Sound

Let me get this out of the way now, the sound in Crysis 2 is really loud; so you may want to have your volume a little lower than your normal unless you want to possibly blow your speakers. With that said, all the sounds, music, and voice-acting are quite rich and detailed. The guns sound satisfyingly powerful. The music is quite excellent and should keep you pumped up throughout the game. The voice-acting, while well performed, suffers in the writing. I can probably attribute that to the confusing story though. There’s also a sizable amount of unnecessary language in the game, especially toward the end. It wasn’t quite as bad as Splinter Cell: Conviction’s language, but it was pretty dang close. Overall, while everything is great, the writing and language really drag down the sound package.

Sound Rating:

Gameplay

I’m going to do something a little different this time and talk about the game’s negatives first. To make a long story short, I couldn’t play the multiplayer in Crysis 2 due to consistent and repeated connection losses. Now before you start suggesting that it’s my internet connection, I just played a full round of Team Deathmatch in Black Ops to assure that my connection is stable, and it is. In Crysis 2, it’s easy enough to get onto a server, but the problem is staying on it. Every 2-5 minutes guaranteed after joining a server, I would be exited out to the login screen with an error saying that I had lost my connection to the opponent, and to please reconnect. I went through this process at least 15 times in one sitting before deciding to quit. The game’s demo also suffered from a similar instability, but was still more playable than the full game’s current state. So if you want a better explanation of the multiplayer, read my Crysis 2 demo impressions.

With that said, the campaign is very much playable and equally enjoyable gameplay-wise. The most noticeable differences from the original Crysis’s gameplay are the way your Nano-Suit functions, the flow of the environment, and the ability to upgrade your suit with different perks on the fly. In the original Crysis, your Nano-Suit’s armor ability was always on by default and drained no energy for being active, and your speed and strength abilities could be toggled at any time. In Crysis 2, your speed and strength abilities are always active in the background, and thus not selectable from the suit menu. Instead, your speed ability automatically activates when you begin sprinting and deactivates when you stop. The same is true with strength, as it will only activate when you hold the melee button to charge an attack. The armor ability is now no longer active by default, and so when you are attacked without it now, the damage goes directly to your health instead of your armor. If you want to benefit from the armor ability, you must activate it; which is really hard to remember to do if you’ve played the original Crysis. Once its activated, the armor ability drains your suit power in the same way that the stealth ability does, except without the movement penalty the stealth ability suffers. It then also drains your suit power when shot while the armor ability is active. This means that you are no longer the near-invincible tank you were in the original Crysis, because your available suit power is a greatly reduced commodity, and thus forces you to fight more tactically.

To help you do this, you now have a Tactical Visor, which allows you to scour the battlefield from a safe distance and plan your attack accordingly. When in use, you cannot use your weapon, but can see flanking and sniping positions, opportunities to sneak around the enemy with your stealth ability, places where you can climb up, and ammo supply crates. You can get by without taking any of these tactical advantages if you see a more efficient way that suits your playstyle. I mostly made my own plans of attack, but found the suggestions in the Tactical Visor to be a good starting place to examine the field.

Another new addition that helps you tactically play the game is the ability to customize your suit with different perks. For example, you can enhance your suit so that it will show you where shots are coming from so you can more quickly find enemies who are hidden behind cover. To buy new perks, you collect Nano-Catalysts from the alien enemies you defeat. Just like with weapon customization, you can change your perk configuration at any time, even during combat; but you will be extremely vulnerable.

Finally, the environments are not nearly as open as in the original Crysis, considering that the whole game takes place in the city. While this provides a more focused experience, I was hoping to experiment with different ways I could tackle a given situation in an open sandbox environment like in the original Crysis. That’s probably just a personal complaint though. Overall, the campaign is solid, but I hope a patch is released soon that will fix the connection issues and at least let me try the multiplayer.

Gameplay Rating:

Story

WARNING: Spoiler Alert!

Wow, this story is a mess! You start the game out as a normal Marine heading to your next assignment in a submarine. The sub is then attacked, you escape, pass out and wake up wearing Prophet’s Nano-Suit. Yes, the same Prophet from the first game. He tells you the aliens infected him, then promptly shoots himself. After that, the story tries to make you believe you’re on a quest to help cure this infection. That route is soon abandoned in favor of a classic “survive the alien invasion” theme, with you being the only person alive with the ability to do so. Then the infection is mentioned again and abandoned again. You blow up some alien structures, and that’s it. If that’s not confusing enough, I seem to remember in a developer interview somewhere that they were going to scrap the first game’s story and restart it in Crysis 2. Why then are the island from the first game and the events that took place on it even mentioned, much less construed as significant? It makes absolutely no sense, and left me little more than annoyed and confused. There’s potential in this story, but it needs to be cleaned up a lot to become even remotely coherent.

Story Rating:

Replay Value

The campaign took me 14 hours to complete on the normal difficulty, which is really quite good for a shooter. It’s fun, and probably worth a second or even third playthrough, but the real replay value is in the game’s multiplayer; which is currently broken (for me at least). Until a patch is released that fixes the connection issues, there’s not much to do here outside of the campaign.

Replay Value Rating:

Final Thoughts and Overall Score

All things considered, Crytek really did a good job on Crysis 2. The real test for them will be to see if they patch the game’s glaring issues sooner, later, or ever. Don’t pull an Ubisoft on us Crytek! Oh yea, one more thing, can we have some mod tools for the game please? The game is available for PC, 360, and PS3.

Crysis 2 Overall Score:

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, with the latest Service Pack
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo at 2Ghz, or AMD Athlon 64 x2 2Ghz, or better
• Memory: 2GB
• Hard Disk Space: 9Gb
• Video Card: NVidia 8800GT with 512Mb RAM or better, ATI 3850HD with 512Mb RAM or better
• Sound: DirectX Compatible Sound Card
• DirectX®: 9.0c   

Crysis Warhead Review

Written 09/02/2010; Updated 2/20/2011

Note: All screenshots and videos were taken from my machine.

Back in 2007, Crytek wowed PC gamers with the stunningly beautiful Crysis. Though it had a sort of typical military story at the beginning that took some pretty interesting and otherworldly twists toward the end, the real stars of the game were the gorgeous visuals, open environments, and your Nano-Suit. Both the good and the bad are mostly back in Crysis Warhead, a stand-alone expansion that puts you in the Nano-Suit of Sergeant Sykes, A.K.A Psycho and tries to fill in some of the blanks from the original Crysis story. Does it succeed? Eh, sort of.

Visuals and Presentation

If you've played Crysis (and if you haven't, why not?!), you already know what Crysis Warhead looks like; lush jungles, snowy wastes, and caverns. Unfortunately though (SPOILER ALERT), that expansive alien ship you explored in the original Crysis is nowhere to be found; so no zero-G for you! The environments that are available are just as beautiful and polished as in the original Crysis, though the best eye candy is definitely the jungle. It's not that the snowy areas and caves look bad by any stretch of the word, but that the CryEngine 2 really shows its graphical prowess best in the way it renders the trees, underbrush, and lighting together to make something truly worth beholding...if your system can run it that is.

If you played the original Crysis back in 2007 you probably hung your head and cried when you read the at-the-time outrageous system specs needed to run the game at any respectable graphics settings. Crysis Warhead requires the same amount of horsepower, but the engine was optimized to run a bit smoother than its predecessor. This makes the system requirements for Warhead just a smidge (and I really mean a smidge) more reasonable. Considering the power of today's consumer level gaming PCs though, finding a machine that can run the game at medium or high settings shouldn't be too difficult.

The character and weapon models are almost all the same from the original Crysis, but there are a few enemy retextures and a few new weapons to add a little variety. Animations and effects are also as solid as in the original, with no noticeable quality drops. My only qualm with the visuals is that the lighting is particularly flat in certain areas of the game, and thus removes some of the atmosphere from those scenes. That only happens in a few small areas that you don't stay in very long though, so I guess it works itself out. Still, you can't get a game to look much prettier than Crysis or Crysis Warhead at max settings.

Visuals and Presentation Rating:

Sound

Sound is another area largely untouched from the original Crysis, and that's definitely not a bad thing. Everything that can be heard is crisp, clear, and high quality. All of the voice actors I can remember from the original Crysis reprise their roles to great effect. I find that the weapon and explosion sounds are where things shine here though. It's just satisfying to pick up a gun and hear a full, rich, and accurate sound the first time you fire it. The sounds of the explosions coupled with the awesome effects make for some quite fulfilling moments. The music, while having some nice ambient and metal tracks, isn't all that memorable. Overall, a nice sound package, but not perfect.

Sound Rating:

Gameplay

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but the gameplay in Warhead is basically a carbon copy of the original Crysis. The level design at first is very open and encourages sandbox tactics to progress, and toward the end of the game the design becomes very linear. The real star is yet again your Nano-Suit, which gives you abilities that would make even Master Chief green(er) with envy. You can give yourself rechargeable armor, inhuman strength to jump extremely high or melee attack with enough force to throw a vehicle, a speed boost to run a quarter mile in two seconds flat, or make yourself invisible to your enemies so you can plan the perfect attack. Even when the game does get to the very linear areas, the Nano-Suit allows you to play your way. Do you sneak around and plan ambushes, go in with guns blazing while your suit takes all the punishment, speed in to grab an enemy by the throat and use him as a meat shield, or knock out everyone's lights with your bare hands? It's entirely up to you! Another very handy tool is the ability to customize your weapons on the fly. An area too dark? Attach a flashlight! Need to throw a grenade farther than usual? Equip the grenade launcher attachment! Hate iron sights? Add a laser sight! I could go on and on.

New with Warhead though is the multiplayer portion of the game called Crysis Wars. Basically, it just consists of the Crysis suit mechanics in a Free-for-All, Team Free-for-All, and objective gametypes. Of those three gametypes, only Power Struggle approaches any semblance of originality. It's basically a hybrid between an RTS with its resource gathering and building and Black Ops' Domination gametype. Each team is tasked with capturing and holding key points of the map until a nuclear weapon can be built which in turn blows up the enemy base. On larger servers, this can take quite a long time with each side struggling to control one or two points on the very large maps. It's also worth noting with the heavily modded nature of the game servers currently makes for some unbalanced gameplay, but it's still fun. Overall, Crysis Wars is enjoyable, but I also think the multiplayer in Crysis 2 will outshine it in nearly every way.

Gameplay Rating:

Story

WARNING! Spoiler Alerts!

Warhead begin at the point in the original Crysis where Psycho parts ways with Nomad, saying that he “had something to take care of”. Honestly though, this story made hardly any sense at all. You start out on a mission against the KPA, then the aliens appear, you chase a Korean general who's captured an alien for experimentation, blow up a lot of stuff, and look at credits. I feel like the story, if you can follow it, was just an excuse to blow stuff up. Considering how solid the gameplay in Warhead is, such an excuse doesn't bother me too much. If you're expecting a cohesive narrative when picking up Warhead though, prepare to be disappointed.

Story Rating:

Replay Value

Considering the game only took me 6 hours to finish and Crysis Wars' lack of gametype originality, Warhead's replayability is highly dependent on how much you enjoy the Power Struggle gametype. With the novelty of the suit powers and overall gameplay, another playthrough on a harder difficulty isn't out of the question if you enjoyed it the first time. So unless you really enjoy Crysis Wars, there's not much here to replay.

Replay Value Rating:

Final Thoughts and Overall Score

If you enjoyed the original Crysis, then Warhead is more of the same; and that's not a bad thing at all. Crysis Wars is fun with the Nano-Suit powers in a multiplayer setting, but limited in the gametypes available. Either way, if you enjoy Crysis or super soldier games in general, you'll likely enjoy Warhead.

Crysis Warhead Overall Score:

System Requirements

Minimum:

• Supported OS: Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Vista
• Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista), Intel Core 2.0 GHz (2.2 GHz for Vista), AMD Athlon 2800+ (3200+ for Vista) or better
• Memory: 1.0 GB RAM (XP) or 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
• Graphics: 256 MB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or better
• DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c or 10
• Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible
• Hard Drive: 15GB