Reviewed on Xbox 360, also available on PC and PS3
PC multiplayer review coming soon
New York, 2033. Much like any other self-respecting apocalyptic future, this one’s playing host to a necrotic contagion that’s turning the locals into some kind of semi-liquid meat product. And a hostile alien invasion too, of course. Maybe it’s all just an intergalactic misunderstanding, and the invading Ceph just dropped by after a GPS error marked Earth as a planet-class fast food drive-through. That would make more sense than whatever’s supposed to be happening, anyway.
Considering the game’s story was written by Richard Morgan, recognised by cool, intelligent people everywhere as the greatest writer in modern fiction, this one’s quite dismayingly lacking in… story. It’s not altogether rubbish, I suppose, but I’d expected something substantially more compelling.
So the entire city’s under martial law, currently enforced by Crynet’s PMC, C.E.L.L. Meanwhile, a United States Marine Corps Force Recon unit has been deployed to locate and extract a Crynet employee who has important information about the baddies.
One thing quickly leads to another, and Force Recon Marine “Alcatraz” finds himself the somewhat startled owner of a spandex leotard with magical superpowers (basically). ADVENTURE ENGAGED.
Now, the Nanosuit (that’s what they call the spandex leotard with magical superpowers, because it’s way more butch) is pretty much fundamental to this game. In fact, for all intents and purposes, the Nanosuit is the game – how you use it more or less defines the entire experience.
Packing four basic modes – enhanced strength and speed, massively augmented armour, and cloaking – the Nanosuit easily accommodates a range of gameplay tactics that can be swapped about at the player’s discretion. Over the course of the game, you can collect discarded Nano Catalyst from dead Ceph units, and invest this in Nanosuit upgrades. Most of these seem somewhat pointless or superficial, but the armour and stealth upgrades are quite useful.
Rather than transforming you instantly into a questionably fashionable god, however, the suit’s functions are elegantly balanced with a bit of simple economy – limited power. For example, when you activate the suit’s cloaking mode, it’ll gradually consume power while you’re standing still or moving very slowly, but rapidly deplete if you take a jog, and shut off almost immediately if you fire a shot. Once the Nanopower Nanogauge is out of Nanojuice, it takes a moment or two to recharge, during which time you’re just a regular grunt who pulled the day’s worst job assignment.
The game’s level design has a conveniently symbiotic relationship with the Nanosuit – sprawling, multi-level, and frequently densely-populated terrain generally presents opportunities for brute force, sniping, tip-toeing about, or a contingent mashup of all three. Just in case you’re overwhelmed by all the options and just can’t make up your mind, the toggled Nanosuit visor overlay also marks resupply drops, points of interest, and suggested strategies in every area.
This dynamic battlefield works well enough in theory, although it should be said that it’s quite possible to get through about 70% of the game using the Nanosuit’s cloaking mode to avoid any and all enemy engagement. That’s entirely the player’s prerogative, of course, but it does make the game’s final few missions almost too easy. I mean, if there’s no reason to actually stop and get involved, why bother? I completed the game on Supersoldier difficulty with very little trouble.
The game doesn’t make a big deal of it, quite surprisingly, but there’s also a very fine cover system in place. When standing or crouching behind walls and other props, you’ll be prompted to lean out and fire from a safe, locked position with some peeking control.
The AI is mostly smart enough to behave realistically in action, although I noticed units occasionally stalling for no apparent reason, becoming stuck on bits of environmental geometry, or even – once or twice, hilariously – blowing themselves and each other up with their own grenades.
And yes, visually, Crysis 2 blows pretty much everything else out of Hudson Bay and into a jealous, extra-planetary orbit. Simply, there is no other game currently available on console that looks this good. Which is really all the more astonishing when you consider that this is Crytek’s first ever console title – and it’s already set a skyscraping new benchmark for every other developer.
The disappointing narrative and inconsistent difficulty notwithstanding, Crysis 2 is a fantastic game – and clocking in at a chunky 10 hours or so of campaign time (with space for replays), there’s a lot of it too. Clever, innovative, superlatively realised, and incomparably sexy, this is a game for everybody who loves FPSes.
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