Crysis 2 (Xbox 360) review "Crysis 2 is easily worth checking out for reasons that go beyond looks (and given how long it is, thank Christ for that). Crytek grants us the ability to turn invisible, leap from the roof of a very tall building and power-kick a parked car into an enemy soldier’s face all within the span of a few seconds, and it’s for those moments that Crysis 2 doesn’t blur together with the pack of steely grey twitch shooters on the market."

I never played the first Crysis, and it’ll probably stay that way for the next two decades or so, until I finally get my hands on a machine powerful enough to run it. I’ve played the sequel, but I played it on Xbox 360, and apparently the PC version smokes its console counterparts in the visual department, which, I mean, holy crap. I’ve played Killzone 2 and Final Fantasy XIII – the PS3 version, mind – and I’m comfortable in saying that Crysis 2 is as pretty a console game as has ever been made. Crytek isn’t afraid to wave it in your face, either. Here’s a team that recognizes how talented its artists are and uses sheer spectacle to the game’s advantage; it’s the kind of thing that actually elevates the material. Had Crysis 2 sucked, I’d still choke up a recommendation if only so you could witness the game’s drool-inducing final set piece.

My conscience can rest easy, however, because Crysis 2 is easily worth checking out for reasons that go beyond looks (and given how long it is, thank Christ for that). Crytek grants us the ability to turn invisible, leap from the roof of a very tall building and power-kick a parked car into an enemy soldier’s face all within the span of a few seconds, and it’s for those moments that Crysis 2 doesn’t blur together with the pack of steely grey twitch shooters on the market. It stands out, and in the industry’s current state, I value that.

This is where I would lay down the plot, but you’ve caught me at a bit of a loss. The original game was tailored for a very specific audience (i.e. people who’ve spent a lot of money beefing up their PCs and want to justify their investment), but EA chose to bring its sequel to a larger audience, probably because they’re still angry that Call of Duty exists and have realized that they’ve got another shooter IP at their disposal. And that’s good, because I wouldn’t have played Crysis 2 otherwise. But the game thrusts you into the thick of this futuristic world without any explanation of the series’ prior events, and as such, I was surprisingly lost for most of the campaign.

I can tell you that Earth is being overrun by squishy aliens who may have landed from space or may in fact be digging their way up from underground, and you’d think that would be simple enough. But there is also an infection of some sort spreading, and numerous humans see you as a point of interest because of the super-powered nanosuit you’re wearing. You’re only wearing the suit because its previous owner, Prophet (the guy from the first game, I’m assuming) was dying and needed you to complete his mission. Your character spends most of the game being mistaken for Prophet, and he never corrects them, because he is a silent protagonist. Some humans want to take the suit from you, some humans want to shoot at you and call you “tin man,” and a select few smart humans want you to use the suit to fight off the aliens. The suit has a voice itself, and it wants you to assess the battlefield and complete objectives.

Yes, the suit. It’s all about the suit. Everything that makes Crysis 2 unique revolves around the suit. You can sprint incredibly fast, jump incredibly high, cloak, and activate near-impenetrable armor, and all of these abilities draw from the same energy meter. It’s actually strikingly reminiscent of last year’s Vanquish; you move through the game by making efficient use of your powers, but should you overexert yourself, you’ll be left a sitting duck without so much as the ability to move quickly.

As an action game, it’s almost impossible to categorize Crysis 2 because the approach is entirely up to the player. You could go the stealth route, jumping from cover to cover under your cloak and quietly backstabbing guards one at a time or even slipping by unnoticed. You could power up your armor and go around blasting enemies with a shotgun, stopping only to give your suit the occasional recharge. You could deploy hit-and-run tactics, quickly taking out a few enemies and then vanishing before they can mount a counterattack. You could leap onto a rooftop, take out a watchman, and turn his sniper rifle against the other guards. You could use the environment to your advantage. Crytek even supplies us with a scanning radar that highlights enemies and even recommends various tactical options. In Crysis 2, you never have an excuse not to be one step ahead of your enemies at all times; it’s just a matter of how you use the tools at your disposal.

While I never played the original, I’m familiar with its brand of free-roaming jungle environments since I own its spiritual predecessor, Far Cry. I feel Crysis 2 does limit itself a bit by being set in a city, as the levels never quite feel as sprawling and open-ended as you’d think a game like this requires. But the game still works when you apply its nonlinearity less to its level design and more to its wealth of approaches to combat. Even when the game inevitably goes all war-torn cityscapes in its second half, I rarely felt like I was being forced to play Crysis 2 any certain way (with the exception of a few tired “defend this position from waves of attackers” scenarios). I made the daring choice to play the campaign on a higher difficulty right out of the gate; that decision sometimes bites me in the ass, but here, it actually encouraged more creative use of the game’s mechanics beyond the simple run-and-gun we’re all so used to.

And what’s cool is that there’s never a “correct” way to do anything. Crysis 2 is sufficient as a straightforward shooter and just as sufficient as a stealth game (disregarding the occasional moment in which an enemy gets stuck to the environment). You can use your cloak to avoid conflict, but leaving guards alive means they’re available in case the enemies in a later section need backup. The corpses of Ceph aliens can be looted for nanosuit upgrades, but the aliens themselves are significantly harder to kill, and they’ve got advanced tools for tracking you, just in case you thought you could sneak around stabbing them without any trouble. It’s rare for such a linear game to provide so many options.

So the solo campaign is both fun and unique, which is why it’s such a bummer that the multiplayer fails to live up to its end of the bargain. It’s essentially just more twitch-based Call of Duty worship, only with the surprisingly inconsequential addition of suit powers thrown into the mix. I suppose it’s competent if you’re not as sick of this sort of thing as I am, but aside from the usual mix of issues (withholding equipment and game modes from new players continues to be a terrible decision, and I often felt that I was battling less with other players and more against my weapons’ absurd recoil), it’s disappointing to come off such a colorful and wildly varied campaign only to stumble into more generic, washed-out deathmatches.

I still play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood religiously, so the idea of a largely stealth-based multiplayer mode isn’t a lost concept to me. The campaign makes me feel like Predator, and had Crytek found a way to introduce that dynamic into the online component, it could have been a winner. Instead, it’s just a bunch of guys running around shooting each other, virtually indistinguishable from the legions of similar games on the market. File this one under missed opportunities.

Still, I’ve only just recently grown an interest in online console gaming (and incidentally, I’ve only just recently bought an Xbox Live subscription), so how would my former self – the one concerned entirely with a good single-player experience – have liked Crysis 2? He would have lapped it up, despite its relative glitchiness and occasional lapses into tired design formulas. Rarely has a game made me feel like this much of a badass for so many reasons all at once. Yes, I’m sure the original was way better. Yes, I’m sure it doesn’t compare to the PC version. But the game I played is pretty sick one way or another, and easily one of my favorites of 2011 so far.

Community review by Suskie (April 18, 2011) Mike Suskie is a freelance writer who has contributed to GamesRadar and has a blog. He can usually be found on Twitter at @MikeSuskie.