Forums → Games → Crysis 2: The Game, the Myth, the Legend

Hello all. Your Friendly Neighborhood Satanist is tired of the intellectuals over at The Escapist and is ready to try and pull some intelligence out of you folk.

So today I'm going to talk about the best shooter of 2011, Crysis 2.



I got this game in the middle of May, my birthday had passed and I was sitting on 60 dollars. It had been a while since I had played a FPS and I wanted something new. Three games stuck in my mind, the Russian-Apocalypse Metro: 2033, the TF2-esque Brink (thank GOD I didn't pick up that one!) and Crysis 2, the sequel to a game I had only heard about from victims of crashed graphics cards and exploded monitors. I knew the first was sub-par, and Homefront was also available, but I decided to take a risk and delve into this console-available game.

(just a reminder to you all, I'm an Xbox 360-based gamer who also delves into a handful of PC games, enjoys TLOZ:TP, and isn't afraid to admit love for Infamous)

You are Alcatraz, a marine who suffers from a severe case of Protagonist Mutism ready for battling whatever is going down in New York City. The player is shown a handful of news clips at the very beginning of the game, showing a transition from a NYC of norm into a haven of chaos and disease. Alcatraz assumes the same, it's a simple mission, and nothing will go wrong. One quite humorous soldier jokes that they "...don't call in Force Recon for an E-Mat evac. There are bad guys up there... I can feel it," Oh how they should have listened. The sub is hit by an unknown object and despite most of the soldiers getting out of it alive, a gigantic ship from the 4th sideways dimensions appears and kills nearly everyone.

I say nearly everyone because a gigantic man in a gleaming gray suit is your Savior. That is Prophet, the protagonist from the first Crysis. And that is the Suit that Alcatraz wears, has to wear.


My hero!

What follows is a sci-fi adventure that can stand next to Halo in awe-inspiring moments, strategic firefights, and memorable characters. The plot is solid, and there are some moments at the end that make you understand the scale of the Nanosuit's capabilities. On top of that, Crysis 2's protagonist is interesting in that despite appearances of a hero made better with a mega-suit, he actually needs the suit. It's a full-body cast. Some time into the game, Alcatraz is told that the crash he was in destroyed his vitals, and the only way to save him was for Prophet to merge the Nanosuit to Al's body. Alcatraz isn't just some unstoppable supersoldier, he's essentially a terminal patient with over-sophisticated life-support. It's quite interesting, and better characterization that most of the other drivel we're given with other shooters. (How many nice-guy Protagonists grouped with The Nerd, The Exploder, and The Black Guy can we take?)

Crysis 2 sets itself apart from other shooters using a unique set of tools embedded in the Nanosuit, the gray gleaming suit seen above. There's your average Sprint 'n Slide function, alongside invisibility, tac-view, NanoVision, Armor Mode, and Kick of DETH. Click the Right Stick for long enough and Alcatraz will call upon the power of the Gods to send the energy of the heavens through his foot, allowing him to reenact his favorite scene from 300 and re-do the NYC street furniture with a few upturned, flaming, PMC Humvees.
Crysis 2 also uses an on-the-fly upgrade system. You can change your scope, barrel attachement, and ammo bursts quickly, and that's not half of it. Alcatraz can also look at his fingers and change some of the suit's perks. This includes an Air Stomp attack, being able to see bullet paths, and the recent tracks of passing enemies highlighting themselves on the ground, allowing another level of tactical shooting to sit upon this grand shooter.

Throughout Crysis 2, I noticed a shade of familiarity in the mechanics and gameplay, excluding the acrobatics and super-strength, the game plays a lot like this titan.


Meet Gordon Freeman, Protagonist of the Half-Life series. Note the Super-Suit with a universal energy source for all purposes. Note the non-weapon pseudo-cutscene moments. Note Nathan Gould.



Like Darksiders, Crysis knew what game series to copy notes from, and executes these notes to the fullest.

Let's look at the multiplayer of the game, which seems to have taken a page from Black Ops' book in terms of progression.

Crysis plays out as a traditional shooter in Multiplayer, and is heavily similar to both Halo and Call of Duty in terms of gameplay, but accentuates on a few key things from both franchises. It has the shields of Halo, the weapons of CoD, the Armor Effects from Halo and the "Pick and Choose" Progression from Black Ops. Crysis gives the player... uh, let's call them "Beer Tickets", for reaching certain levels and getting X number of headshots/kills/doing something. With these "Beer Tickets", Players can use a Dogtag Unlock to, well, unlock a new Visual Tag, or a weapon unlock to get a new weapons, et cetera, et cetera.

There are Kill Streaks, nothing too new, Radar get, Radar jam, Enter Helicopter, Enter LAZER OF DOOM, et cetera, et cetera. The Perk System also works similarly to the "Beer Ticket" method mentioned above.

Crysis 2 does feature a lot of different game modes like Halo, and has the same feel of equality that you have in Halo. In Crysis Campaign, you ahnilate everyone, on a one-on-one battle with an Alien or a PMC agent, Alcatraz will use the aforementioned KICK OF DETH to defeat all foes and declare himself ruler of the Heavens, but in Multiplayer, everyone has the same abilities that they do in SP, and trying to out-think your opponents in a shooter setting is always a blast. Overall, Crysis 2's multiplayer is the 2nd best of the year, beating out Portal 2's one-go Coop, and only falling short to Mortal Kombat's intense fighting action.

And now we meet the true importance of Crysis 2, the fact it came out.

You'll often hear me rant on these forums about the "Importance" of Crysis 2. There is one reason this FPS is the most important of the year, bar none,





On March 15th, the Industry was expecting their equivalent of a Korean Red Dawn, not just in premise, but in quality. What they got was the highest-profile Call of Duty clone, ever. The FPS market hit a standstill, it had shown that it had become mainstream to make games for money, not quality. I mean, when a game sells NOS to you via Cover, or tries to have dynamic characters by making them whiny and un-realistic in an attempt to be realistic, combined with the EXACT SAME CONTROLS AND MULTIPLAYER AS BLACK OPS, that's when you start to lose hope in Games. (Oh yea, Why didn't Carter just throw the explosives? I mean, he wasn't a Tragic Hero or anything, there was nothing stopping him from just throwing the explosives and living. And why are we supposed to care if he dies anyway? Wasn't he just the biggest jerk-off for the past 6 hours?)

Enter Cryis 2. With its innovative design, epic SP, strategic layering, and, the icing on the cake (you knew it was coming), Graphical Perfection, Crysis 2 saved the FPS from being the cash-in genre. (Ironically, EA says that all potential Crysis games following will be multiplatform titles because of the money it surprisingly made on Crysis 2. Crysis 1 is even coming to consoles! Squee!)

Crysis 2. It's the best-looking game out there. It saved the most popular genre in Games. It catapulted EA's dominance over the industry and made more people look into the upcoming epic Battlefield 3. While it was at it, it told a Sci-Fi tale of Half-Life proportions and shot its way to the top with some notes from Halo and Call of Duty. It's the best game of 2011 so far, and one of the better games I've played in a long time.

-Chillz