It had been a while since I had played a 'new' game and one of the good things about not being overly bothered about keeping up with the brand new big titles or new consoles, is that I have the pick of older games that I have not played but do not need to pay £40 for. In this case I had heard positive things about this series and also enjoy shooters and stealth games, so decided it was worth the £5 I paid. The story picks up from the first game although it really doesn't matter too much if you haven't played it. Basically you end up inside a powerful nanosuit in the middle of a New York which is under attack from aliens while also on lockdown by a military contractor. With guidance from your new allies, you have to battle your way through New York while also trying to find out the secret power that the suit can have as a weapon in the bigger picture fight against the aliens.
I have used a lot of words there to describe the plot, and the game also uses a lot of cutscenes and dialogue to do the same, but I must confess that I found myself rather detached from the narrative. Maybe it was because I hadn't played the first game, but also I didn't really get a feel for the players involved, the stakes and the specifics. Too much of the story was 'go here, go there', which comes with the video game genre, but it wasn't particularly well thought out as a story – too often it just felt like the writers were working out how to create levels within the basic frame of the story.
The action works pretty well though. You have choices as to whether you blast your way though using shields to absorb damage, or sneak your way through using the electronic cloaking device – or of course you can do a bit of both. None of the combinations or options are without faults but mostly they are fun to play and I really didn't find any part of the game frustrating. It would have been nice to have felt more of a contest though – mostly you feel like you are playing against yourself, so as long as I didn't do anything dumb, the game was not really too hard. The enemy AI was a bit off – sometimes not really seeming smart, but then other times able to track me based off nothing. It does still work though and in fairness there was decent variety in the play if you wanted it – and even if you didn't there were times where it really made sense to proceed a certain way.
Visually the game is very impressive; the New York is well designed as sets and the characters look and move well. The issue I have is that it does feel like 'sets' as opposed to a world. You very much are in contained locations where you do not always have a massive range of movement – not quite a straight line shooter perhaps, but no matter how big the 'rooms' are, you are basically moving through the rooms the game wants you to go through. The bigger action sequences look great, with big sci-fi moments, but the problem tends to be that they happen in cut scenes or moments where the player is out of the game so that the graphics can deliver their big moment. I am a sucker for big cinematic action in FPS games (I enjoy this aspect of the COD:MW games) but here I felt like I was outside of it rather than really in the middle – which is a shame.
Crysis 2 is fun if you like shooters, and it does give you options as to how to play, but it has weaknesses in the narrative and the use of cut scenes. These weaknesses and others kept me from really getting into the game and getting caught up in the action of it all. It was fun to play and I enjoyed it for what it was, but it didn't do enough to make me want to pick up more of the franchise – and not being able to skip the cut scenes is limited my desire to jump back into it again, but maybe that will change with time.
