While Crysis does live up to its reputation of a technical marvel (when one considers the year it was released in) it fails to impress or be enjoyable in any other regard. Perhaps I am going through a bitter phase where all media is ‘not enough’, in which case I will edit this post later with my revised views. But for the time being I must say that I found playing through Crysis 2 really boring.
The story is just uneventful. You run from checkpoint A to B at the beck and call of various off-screen characters and shoot at whoever they tell you to shoot. Enemies turn to allies and you carry on, silent, unphased, detached. But not in the cool way that the Doom Guy is, rather in the silent way that a poorly written character might. I am not one to demand a moving story in my fps games. I am all for a simple story that focuses on just working through hordes of enemies. However Crysis made combat unrewarding too.
It isn’t bad or clunky, it is just nothing interesting. Which is sad because you’d imagine that having a super-powered nanosuit would make shooting your way through NYC really fun. However, the game nerfs the suit to be terribly limited in its ability and has a really dumb AI for the enemies. So nor are they smart enough to be challenging, but the suit never really lets you feel badass. If you use the Armor mode, you take a few more bullets than you would without it on, which in games is like being a standard Call of Duty soldier.
If you use Stealth mode, people are blind to your presence even when you thump your way around, but you can’t stealth kill your way through the map because the damn button is clunky and half the enemies don’t die to stealth kills, making the whole mode somewhat redundant.
The game keeps advising you that the suit’s limited power makes it best suited (hah) to hit and run tactics. Surely that is what normal soldiers when confronted with a larger force would do anyway? So what then did the suit give me that being a normal marine might not have? Hell, even the power mode which lets me sprint feels pathetic considering the sprint is slower than my average running pace (6mins/km for anyone asking). Soldier 76 of Overwatch fame could probably take on Prophet and walk away unscathed.
Somehow this game left a sour taste in my mouth, what a waste of potentially exciting combat. Maybe I am judging it too harshly. 2011 was nine years away and perhaps back then AI was just not that good. No wait, Batman Arkham City, Portal 2 and Gears of War 3 came out then. Crysis 2 is just beautifully boring.