Maximum Update

Okay... so I took another break from posting... I know I know... My bad. BUT it's not my fault! I got stuck in Borderlands and then Bulletstorm came out then I got lost in Crysis!!!!! Anyways... this will either be one mammoth update, or it will be the first of several over the next few days (probably lol)...

Let's start with the most recent thing to hit me... Crysis 2.

I don't know how many of you managed to upgrade your computers years back when Crytek's darling, Crysis, came out, but I did. I invested a small fortune on a new box JUST to run that game, and it was worth every cent. Crysis was amazing. A psuedo-free-roaming shooter with a LOT of freedom in gameplay styles, a nice story, and jaw-dropping pants-creaming visuals, I lapped it up and to date have played the game through at least six times, and replayed almost every section heaps more.

A couple of years later, Crysis Warhead came out. Telling the story of the first game from another character's point of view, it sported similar visuals, gameplay and was all together a nice addition to the franchise, if not the sequel we'd been waiting for.

Finally, now, we have the long-awaited sequel, and not just on nuclear power plant specced PCs this time, but also on Xbox 360 and PS3. And despite the concerns of 110% of the PC gamer audience that a console port would result in a borked game, Crysis 2 does a wonderful job at mass-marketing the franchise and expanding the world within it.

Let's start with the story.

WARNING: There are light spoilers in this section. If you haven't played the game yet and you don't want to discover small details of the story, then DO NOT read the section within the ***** marks.

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You play Alcatraz; a marine who basically gets killed in the opening segment of the game. Luckily for you, Prophet (remember him?) stumbles across your very messed up ass and says something along the lines of "Hey guy... want my billion dollar suit? It'll keep you alive... wont fix you but you will live in a state of perpetual dying within its suit, and despite your bones being shattered into a paste, and your organs being pureed into liquid, you will be able to walk around. No catches... except you gotta save the human race, kay?"... Prophet then proceeds to shoot himself in the head and TA-DA! Alcatraz has become a superhero... well, kinda... no cape though.

Unfortunately, everyone still thinks you are Prophet, and Prophet seems to have made some friends who like to play "shoot your friend in the face until he dies then steal his suit"... Naturally, you're all like "NO THANKYOU!" and run away to start going about that minor task that Prophet gave you prior to leaving this world.

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Good enough premise... and good enough suit. Seriously, the suit rocks. You know in Crysis 1 and Warhead you had to spend heaps of time swapping from jump/sprint to cloak, then back to sprint, then to armor? Well, now, they have made almost all the suit functions automated. You can sprint like normal games and it automatically kicks in the power-sprint... if you hold down the jump button you auto-leap (and Masterchief got nothin' on this jump!)... your melee is automatically a power melee if you hold the melee button down and so on. In fact, the only two functions you have to manually select is the cloak (which you will be using about 90% of the time) and the armor (the other 10% of the time). It may sound dumbed-down... but in fact it works really well and streamlines the whole suit feature really well. No doubt it was to help with key-mapping for console versions but it is, IMHO, a very strong step forward.

Other gameplay features that have changed mainly revolve around the environments. Unlike the previous two games, Crysis 2 takes place in a crumbling mid-apocalyptic urban New York. Along with this change comes certain drawbacks. There is not as much foliage for one. You wont be crushing and Koreans with falling tree trunks here. Also, levels are a LOT more linear. There is often still multiple ways and paths to complete objectives, but they all lie along the same main line. It's a little disappointing, but what does make up for it is the increased vertical gameplay.

I know a LOT of games are advertising "TRUE VERTICAL GAMEPLAY FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER!" these days, and some even manage to achieve it (Dark Void comes to mind, despite its overall crapness), but Crysis 2 really has nailed it here. The crumbling remains of Manhattan really do allow for a lot of height variety, and I found myself on several occassions forgetting to look up and down, and wondering why I died. This also crosses over very well to multiplayer (more on that soon though).

Overall, the single player of Crysis 2 is good. It's better than good, I'd say its a 8.5/10. It is not, however, as good as the first two games. I can't help but yearn for an open-world, filled with tropical growth and perfect trap/ambush opportunities to be a sneaky ninja fuck.

However, multiplayer on this beast is fucking brilliant.

I was about 2/3s through the campaign before I fired up the online component, and then it took me another 2 weeks to finish the story.

Bearing many similarities to modern popular shooters (such as Call of Duty), the multiplayer portion of this dish is very accessible to the mass market. Where it comes into it's own is simply put... "The suit". What Crysis has that other shooters don't is the nanosuit, which changes almost everything about multiplayer.

Furthermore, the suit has many upgradeable modules that alter how you can use it. And you can only attach 3 of these (one power, one armor, and one stealth) at a time, meaning that you end up with a lot of different loadout combinations. Now, obviously, this works similar to the perk systems of a lot of war-based shooters these days, but then throw into the game the increased jumping, the cloaking, the armor, etc. and you have something all together different. It is a LOT of fun and a very good game. I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Overall, Crysis 2 is a good release. I wouldn't say it was a disappointment, just different to what I was expecting. I would have liked to leave Manhattan and hit outer New York for a variety of environment, or perhaps some time in another part of the world, etc. But the game didn't get repetative either, so I guess it's a win.

On that note I shall leave it here... but soon will be a bit about Bulletstorm, as well as some other titles I've been hitting up in my break from posting.