June 18, 2011
Disintigrating Like The Voice In My Ear Ordered
Crysis 2 is a game with guns. You fire these guns at both humans and aliens, and then they die.
Crysis 2 is a mediocre game.
There are a lot of things about Crysis 2 that are alright. The controls are solid, and the guns, for the most part, have a fantastic feel to them, something a lot of games get wrong. Even the wussiest pistol feels cool to shoot in the game, and that is to the game’s credit. Sneaking around with the stealth on is fairly easy, and can make you feel fairly powerful, though you do have to try or you will get caught. The first few wide open areas you get into are kind of cool. The game realistically keeps one in the chamber if you reload early, which was a shock when I realized it and a nice touch. It’s very pretty to look at.
I think that’s about all I thought was solid about the game.
There are two main problems with the game. One is the encounters. The combat encounters in this game get stale fast. You are a fairly powerful individual, as you should be, since you’re in a powersuit, and the designers quickly realized they had no good way to challenge you. Thus, enemies start being able to sap your suit energy, either through SMGs that fire ELECTRIC BULLETS or a little EMP shockwave that some of the larger tanks have. The SMGs are just annoying, but they do take away what makes the game feel unique, which just feels kind of stupid of them to do. The EMP shockwave on the alien tanks is just a huge clusterfuck. You have to sneak behind the big tanks to do any damage. (You can deal more damage to all aliens by getting them from behind, but for the big tanks, it’s required, not just a good idea to move forward quickly.) To sneak behind them, you must stealth. But they can knock you out of stealth with that EMP blast whenever they feel like it. It’s really, really frustrating. The “tank” enemies, heavily armored aliens, are also annoying because they just take so much ammunition to kill. It’s ridiculous. After about the halfway point of the game, Crysis 2 is throwing these enemy types at you CONSTANTLY, attempting desperately to make a combat scenario interesting. When it’s not doing that, it’s setting you up for stealth kills on a ledge, but once you snipe everyone and jump down, it spawns a million guys, making your stealth useless. It’s frustrating.
The other main problem is the plot. Now, it’s a shoot-guys game, so plot isn’t important, but goodness, it shoves it down your throat. I could live with that if it wasn’t so stupid. Your character has no connection to anyone in the story being told. He knows no backstory, and it’s never explained why things are happening. He’s just there, going through multiple MGS4 Microwave sequences because people he doesn’t know are telling him to in his ear. These people in your ear betray each other, and keep switching around, but it means nothing, because you never really understood what any of them were trying to do, so you have no investment in who is giving you commands. One minute, the marines are helping you. The next, they’re shooting you. Why? The game certainly doesn’t do a very good job of attempting to explain it. I guess there’s one bad marine? I think I kicked him out a window. I have no idea. Again, either let the story go away, or make it interesting. Don’t shove it down my throat and then make it not make any sense. From what I’ve heard, the story is still completely disconnected if you had played Crysis. It’s insane.
Both of these things are bad, but when you add it to the fact that this game is easily too long, you have a recipe for mediocrity. From about the halfway point on, I kept thinking “this game doesn’t have anything else to show me, I must be in the endgame,” but I wasn’t. It just kept going, and spawning more and more horrible encounters and having more and more cutscenes that were completely disconnected from everything. Bleh.
The base mechanics are fine, and the game looks pretty gorgeous, but it does so many things wrong and, at the end of the day, having a button that makes me as invulnerable as I normally am in a video game doesn’t actually make you feel badass, it turns out. Give it a rent like I did, if you want to try it, but I don’t really understand who would truly enjoy this game. At best, it’s a passable shooter that’s pretty.