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TheGreySpectre
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- May 1, 2005
- Messages
- 439
Let me start off by saying I know there are a couple other crysis threads like the "official crysis 2 thread" however as they are focused on entirely on a few issues such as lack of graphics options, lack of prone and lack of directx 11 I thought I would write up a review that actually tried to tackle all aspects of the game. Yes the game has been consoled, yes the lack of prone Dx11 and prone suck, no one denies this. Yes crytek is full of BS in claiming they are fully behind the PC industry. I would prefer if we could avoid these topics in this thread and actually try to cover how the gameplay and story were and changes unrelated to graphics, those have all been beat to death in other threads.
I wrote this after finishing the game hoping to help people who have not decided yet on whether or not to purchase it.
Important facts:
Time to complete - 12 hours to complete
System specs used: Stock AMD Phenom 2 9850 (2.5ghz quad core), 6 gigs of Ram, AMD 6870
Game settings: 2560 x 1600, Very High
Purchased through steam
Overall impressions:
I won't lie, I was pretty pissed when I booted up the game and found that there were almost no graphics settings. I was also rather annoyed at the lack of tie in to Crysis 1/ crysis warhead. Once I got past the graphics issue and started evaluating the actual game though I was rather impressed. The game looks fantastic, game play is varied and the story is actually pretty decent. This has been one of the few FPSes in a while that I was actually satisfied with my purchase on. It had solid gameplay, a decent plot, a good ending and was long enough to provide satisfaction. That being said I think multiplayer is currently very buggy (I know I am not the only one having issues) and takes a step backwards from crysis wars to a simple COD clone. I would recommend this game for the single player campaign, but not for the multiplayer.
Below I have detailed my opinions on the game more specifically. Green meens I thought it was better, Yellow means I am neutral on the issue, Red means I thought it was worse compared to previous Crytek games. Not everything is weighted equally (hence why some general categories may be green even though they have more red subcategories, some of those sub categories may just not be a big deal to me).
The Suit:
I really liked the new suit. In Crysis 1 personally I rarely ever used speed mode or power mode. In Crysis 2 they changed the powers around and now I actually use them all. All of these powers now have hot keys tied to them and are much easier to switch between (though you can still now access them through a Crysis 1 style menu if you want). Overall I really liked the new suit changes and found myself switching between all the abilities quite often The suit also has 4 modules you can upgrade with stuff you get from killing aliens.
Here is a rundown on the suit powers now
Cloak - about the same as Crysis one although the graphic looks better. Also if you have a silencer on your weapon and are at near full energy you can stay in cloak while firing (although it does drain energy really fast, esp. depending on the silenced weapon used)
Cloak Graphics: Screenshot
Armor - Armor is now an active mode that drains suit energy while on. However when it is on it provides a lot of bullet protection, you actually feel like you are in armor and can take a lot of hits. The new armor change made armor at least for me go from back up regen energy mode to a mode I actually used for assault. This mode also has a graphic now.
Armor mode Graphics while not being shot: Screenshot
Armor graphics while being hit with bullets: Screenshot
Speed/Power - These have been integrated into to sprint, melee and jump functionality now. Unfortunately you can only sprint while draining energy, but for jump and melee you tap the button to do a normal no-energy jump or normal melee and hold the button to do a power jump or power melee. I found this to work much better than the system in Crysis 1, It caused me to actually use power melee quite often as it was faster to use (you can also use these abilities while in armor or cloaked mode). You can now also use strength to stabilize scoped weapons just by holding shift instead of switching modes and can do it while in other modes like armor or cloak. I thought this was a very good change.
Nanovision - New mode , basically just thermal vision, replaces night vision ,can be active at the same time as other modes. This was a good addition although I do wish they had both this and night vision.
Nano Vision: Screenshot
Visor/binocs: unfortunately now you only get 1x / 3x zoom instead of 1x/5x/10x but now on your visor will display tactical options, like sniping points, and ammo boxes. Your binocs and HUD also display your current objective and distance, I thought this was a good change from Crysis 1 except for the lack of 10x zoom. It now also looks more like something that would display on the inside of a visor.
Visor tactical options: Screenshot
Weapons:
Variety - There are more weapons then there are in Crysis 1 and there distribution is better. There are now 3 pistols, 2 submachine guns, 3 rifles, 2 sniper rifles, 2 shotguns, 2 machine guns, a grenade launcher and a heavy machine gun that you can rip off of tanks/emplacements and carry around (although the HMG you can't reload and has no attachments), a missile launcher, c4 and grenades. In addition most of these weapons are available throughout the game, so unlike Crysis 1 you actually have some choice rather than running around with he AK47 the entire game. There is no end game super weapon however. I thought the weapon variety was a big improvement over Crysis 1
Ammo Availability - There are boxes to refill all your ammo on all your standard guns all over the place (these boxes tend to specialty ammo such as gauss rifle ammo or grenades). I found this to be very nice as you never had to worry about running out of ammo and could you whatever your favorite gun was for the most part. I ran through a good portion of the game with the DSG-1 Sniper rifle because I like sniping and did not have to worry about running out of sniper ammo.
Attachments - Attachments are now weapon specific. You can no longer attach any attachment to any weapon. I found this to be a little lame considering guns use standardized rails. The laser sight is now considered a weapon sight as well so you can no longer use the laser in combination with the reflex/acog / sniper scope, I found this to be stupid and thought that the new laser sight sucks. The lines in the scopes are pretty thick (they did not make me thing of actual scopes at all) overall I was rather disappointed with the new weapon attachments.
Sidearms - You no longer have a separate sidearm slot. You now get 2 weapons no matter what they are, this renders pistols almost entirely useless as why would you carry a pistol instead of an assault rifle/sniper rifle/shotgun if you had the choice. Also you can no longer dual wield pistols. I found this to be rather disappointing.
Crosshairs - unlike Crysis 1 there are no crosshair options, kind of a bummer but not a huge deal as most of the time you use ADS.
Graphics
Visuals - Overall the games looks fantastic, could it have been better if it was developed soley for the PC, yeah probably but I still think this is currently one of the best if not the best looking PC game that is currently released. The faces in the game were the best people I have seen in any game to date and it was the first time since Half life 2 where I have gone "damn that person looks damn good". The suit and weapons are also incredibly detailed.
Dude in Crysis 3:Screenshot
Animations - There are a lot more animations for falling long distances, climbing up on stuff opening doors and so forth where you see your hands/feet, I thought they were all very well done and added decently to the immersion.
Graphics controls - This was a serious WTF moment for me. There is almost zero control over the graphics options. You can control the resolution, and change the game to one of 3 settings, low, medium or high (called high, very high and extreme though) and set you fOV via console. No control over motion blur, no control over bloom, no control over AA or AF, they even locked down the console so that unlike the demo you can no longer adjust these settings via console. What the hell crytek. HUGE negative for me. BTW Default FOV is 55 degrees verticaly, corresponding to 79 degrees horizontally (at 16:10)
No directx 11 or 64bit support: I know if I don't bring it up someone else will. The game is directx 9 only currently and they have claimed that they will add dx11 support eventually. Honestly this is not a huge deal for me as I still think the game looks fantastic, could it look better if it was in dx11 yes, but honestly it still looks better then pretty much anything else so it doesn't really matter that much.
Optimization - The game runs fantastic and very smooth I was actually rather impressed with how well it ran considering how good it looks. I find the game actually runs a bit smoother then original Crysis even though it looks better (in my opinion). I have heard that there are some issues with SLI/crossfire, I have not encountered these as I do not have an SLIed system.
General Gameplay
ADS/crouch toggle: I know there were a lot of complaints about this from the demo so I thought I would address it. There is now a menu option to set if crouch is toggle or hold the button and if ADS is toggled or button held.
Removal of Prone: There is no prone, yes it sucks and is probably a casualty of being ported to consoles, but in the end once you get used to not having it, it is not really a huge loss.
Tie in to Crysis 1: I was very disappointed in the lack of tie to Crysis 1.
I strongly suspect this is due to the game being ported to consoles that did not have access to the first game.
Crysis 2 Aliens: Screenshot
Story: If you evaluate the story on it's actually pretty decent. There are some twists and turns and things that you would not expect. Crytek's writing has never been fantastic, but this story was actually pretty decent. I would put it the overall story arc actually as their best story so far however the characterization was lacking.
Characterization: Crytek tried to go with a silent protagonist this time and it just did not work very well. The main character just has no defining traits and until the midway through the game you are generally only on the radio with one person at a time and hence don't even feel like you are part of a team. Some of the NPCs are decent, but even then you have almost no connection to them (most of them don't even know who you are) and hence don't really care about them. While the story was good I thought the story was good, characterization was pretty crappy.
Ending: In the light of many recent games I have played I feel that it is worthwhile to note that this game has an actual ending. While the ending does leave the possibility of a sequel it is a very much a you kicked ass and beat the game ending. It was actually one of the more satisfying FPS endings I have had in a while. I thought the ending was more satisfying then the ending to crysis 1.
Saves: Crysis 2 uses a checkpoint system I have heard a lot of people call it consolized, however you have to remember Far Cry did not use quick saves either. I don't really have any feelings on this either way as while there checkpoints are a little unforgiving they to deny me the ability to quicksave spam (which is probably for the best considering I will save like 5 times a battle in a game with quicksave). If you have checkpoints you will probably find this a negative.
Game play Variety - I found that there was a good variety in scenarios. There were some scenarios that strongly favored sneaking around and either assassinating people one at a time while remaining undetected while there were other scenarios with constant streams of guys where wading into groups of dudes with a HMG was a great option. Overall I liked the variety and thought it accommodated a good deal of play styles. I thought game play had more variety then Crysis 1.
Linearity - The game is more linear then Crysis 1. For the most part it is a rail shooter without the huge jungles of Crysis 1 to sneak through. They do try to provide multiple options for a lot of the encounters, but it is still a little bit more of a rail shooter then Crysis 1.
Multiplayer:
I was not able to play multiplayer, but not for lack of trying. Every time I start up the game and go to multiplayer it asks me for a my serial key (I have now entered my serial key a good 15 times). Pretty much every server I join claims it is full, even if immediately after the refresh it only has 12/16 people in it. After 1 attempt any server that is not full will claim that my serial code is in use. I did manage to get into a server once, but I waited 5 minutes in the lobby and the game never started. I can do some evaution based of the demo however.
This is COD with supersuits. I don't mean it has similar game mods or anything like that, I mean it is pretty much exactly COD with super suits. Most of the suit modules directly mimic COD perks and the kill streaks are very similar as well. Again I have not played the full version so I cannot comment on the balance of the guns, but overall I thought it was fun. If you like COD multiplayer you will probably like Crysis 2 multiplayer, if you don't like COD then you probably won't like Crysis 2 multiplayer it's that simple. The Suit modes (Nanovision, cloak, armor) give it a very small amount of difference from COD, but not much.
I hope this is helpful to some people
*edited to change screenshots to links
I wrote this after finishing the game hoping to help people who have not decided yet on whether or not to purchase it.
Important facts:
Time to complete - 12 hours to complete
System specs used: Stock AMD Phenom 2 9850 (2.5ghz quad core), 6 gigs of Ram, AMD 6870
Game settings: 2560 x 1600, Very High
Purchased through steam
Overall impressions:
I won't lie, I was pretty pissed when I booted up the game and found that there were almost no graphics settings. I was also rather annoyed at the lack of tie in to Crysis 1/ crysis warhead. Once I got past the graphics issue and started evaluating the actual game though I was rather impressed. The game looks fantastic, game play is varied and the story is actually pretty decent. This has been one of the few FPSes in a while that I was actually satisfied with my purchase on. It had solid gameplay, a decent plot, a good ending and was long enough to provide satisfaction. That being said I think multiplayer is currently very buggy (I know I am not the only one having issues) and takes a step backwards from crysis wars to a simple COD clone. I would recommend this game for the single player campaign, but not for the multiplayer.
Below I have detailed my opinions on the game more specifically. Green meens I thought it was better, Yellow means I am neutral on the issue, Red means I thought it was worse compared to previous Crytek games. Not everything is weighted equally (hence why some general categories may be green even though they have more red subcategories, some of those sub categories may just not be a big deal to me).
The Suit:
I really liked the new suit. In Crysis 1 personally I rarely ever used speed mode or power mode. In Crysis 2 they changed the powers around and now I actually use them all. All of these powers now have hot keys tied to them and are much easier to switch between (though you can still now access them through a Crysis 1 style menu if you want). Overall I really liked the new suit changes and found myself switching between all the abilities quite often The suit also has 4 modules you can upgrade with stuff you get from killing aliens.
Here is a rundown on the suit powers now
Cloak - about the same as Crysis one although the graphic looks better. Also if you have a silencer on your weapon and are at near full energy you can stay in cloak while firing (although it does drain energy really fast, esp. depending on the silenced weapon used)
Cloak Graphics: Screenshot
Armor - Armor is now an active mode that drains suit energy while on. However when it is on it provides a lot of bullet protection, you actually feel like you are in armor and can take a lot of hits. The new armor change made armor at least for me go from back up regen energy mode to a mode I actually used for assault. This mode also has a graphic now.
Armor mode Graphics while not being shot: Screenshot
Armor graphics while being hit with bullets: Screenshot
Speed/Power - These have been integrated into to sprint, melee and jump functionality now. Unfortunately you can only sprint while draining energy, but for jump and melee you tap the button to do a normal no-energy jump or normal melee and hold the button to do a power jump or power melee. I found this to work much better than the system in Crysis 1, It caused me to actually use power melee quite often as it was faster to use (you can also use these abilities while in armor or cloaked mode). You can now also use strength to stabilize scoped weapons just by holding shift instead of switching modes and can do it while in other modes like armor or cloak. I thought this was a very good change.
Nanovision - New mode , basically just thermal vision, replaces night vision ,can be active at the same time as other modes. This was a good addition although I do wish they had both this and night vision.
Nano Vision: Screenshot
Visor/binocs: unfortunately now you only get 1x / 3x zoom instead of 1x/5x/10x but now on your visor will display tactical options, like sniping points, and ammo boxes. Your binocs and HUD also display your current objective and distance, I thought this was a good change from Crysis 1 except for the lack of 10x zoom. It now also looks more like something that would display on the inside of a visor.
Visor tactical options: Screenshot
Weapons:
Variety - There are more weapons then there are in Crysis 1 and there distribution is better. There are now 3 pistols, 2 submachine guns, 3 rifles, 2 sniper rifles, 2 shotguns, 2 machine guns, a grenade launcher and a heavy machine gun that you can rip off of tanks/emplacements and carry around (although the HMG you can't reload and has no attachments), a missile launcher, c4 and grenades. In addition most of these weapons are available throughout the game, so unlike Crysis 1 you actually have some choice rather than running around with he AK47 the entire game. There is no end game super weapon however. I thought the weapon variety was a big improvement over Crysis 1
Ammo Availability - There are boxes to refill all your ammo on all your standard guns all over the place (these boxes tend to specialty ammo such as gauss rifle ammo or grenades). I found this to be very nice as you never had to worry about running out of ammo and could you whatever your favorite gun was for the most part. I ran through a good portion of the game with the DSG-1 Sniper rifle because I like sniping and did not have to worry about running out of sniper ammo.
Attachments - Attachments are now weapon specific. You can no longer attach any attachment to any weapon. I found this to be a little lame considering guns use standardized rails. The laser sight is now considered a weapon sight as well so you can no longer use the laser in combination with the reflex/acog / sniper scope, I found this to be stupid and thought that the new laser sight sucks. The lines in the scopes are pretty thick (they did not make me thing of actual scopes at all) overall I was rather disappointed with the new weapon attachments.
Sidearms - You no longer have a separate sidearm slot. You now get 2 weapons no matter what they are, this renders pistols almost entirely useless as why would you carry a pistol instead of an assault rifle/sniper rifle/shotgun if you had the choice. Also you can no longer dual wield pistols. I found this to be rather disappointing.
Crosshairs - unlike Crysis 1 there are no crosshair options, kind of a bummer but not a huge deal as most of the time you use ADS.
Graphics
Visuals - Overall the games looks fantastic, could it have been better if it was developed soley for the PC, yeah probably but I still think this is currently one of the best if not the best looking PC game that is currently released. The faces in the game were the best people I have seen in any game to date and it was the first time since Half life 2 where I have gone "damn that person looks damn good". The suit and weapons are also incredibly detailed.
Dude in Crysis 3:Screenshot
Animations - There are a lot more animations for falling long distances, climbing up on stuff opening doors and so forth where you see your hands/feet, I thought they were all very well done and added decently to the immersion.
Graphics controls - This was a serious WTF moment for me. There is almost zero control over the graphics options. You can control the resolution, and change the game to one of 3 settings, low, medium or high (called high, very high and extreme though) and set you fOV via console. No control over motion blur, no control over bloom, no control over AA or AF, they even locked down the console so that unlike the demo you can no longer adjust these settings via console. What the hell crytek. HUGE negative for me. BTW Default FOV is 55 degrees verticaly, corresponding to 79 degrees horizontally (at 16:10)
No directx 11 or 64bit support: I know if I don't bring it up someone else will. The game is directx 9 only currently and they have claimed that they will add dx11 support eventually. Honestly this is not a huge deal for me as I still think the game looks fantastic, could it look better if it was in dx11 yes, but honestly it still looks better then pretty much anything else so it doesn't really matter that much.
Optimization - The game runs fantastic and very smooth I was actually rather impressed with how well it ran considering how good it looks. I find the game actually runs a bit smoother then original Crysis even though it looks better (in my opinion). I have heard that there are some issues with SLI/crossfire, I have not encountered these as I do not have an SLIed system.
General Gameplay
ADS/crouch toggle: I know there were a lot of complaints about this from the demo so I thought I would address it. There is now a menu option to set if crouch is toggle or hold the button and if ADS is toggled or button held.
Removal of Prone: There is no prone, yes it sucks and is probably a casualty of being ported to consoles, but in the end once you get used to not having it, it is not really a huge loss.
Tie in to Crysis 1: I was very disappointed in the lack of tie to Crysis 1.
None of the aliens make a reappearance from the first game (I hated fighting the flying ones, but I would have thought at least the walkers would have reappeared). The aliens look different (for some reason they are all read now instead of all blue. There is absolutely no reference them sucking the energy out of stuff and making the big cold spheres (a decently large portion of Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead) there is no mention of Psycho or Nomad (except a possible single sentence that is very indirect and may not refer to them at all) and only passing reference to prophets trip back to the island or the fact that prophet basically goes nuts at the end of the first game.
Crysis 2 Aliens: Screenshot
Story: If you evaluate the story on it's actually pretty decent. There are some twists and turns and things that you would not expect. Crytek's writing has never been fantastic, but this story was actually pretty decent. I would put it the overall story arc actually as their best story so far however the characterization was lacking.
Characterization: Crytek tried to go with a silent protagonist this time and it just did not work very well. The main character just has no defining traits and until the midway through the game you are generally only on the radio with one person at a time and hence don't even feel like you are part of a team. Some of the NPCs are decent, but even then you have almost no connection to them (most of them don't even know who you are) and hence don't really care about them. While the story was good I thought the story was good, characterization was pretty crappy.
Ending: In the light of many recent games I have played I feel that it is worthwhile to note that this game has an actual ending. While the ending does leave the possibility of a sequel it is a very much a you kicked ass and beat the game ending. It was actually one of the more satisfying FPS endings I have had in a while. I thought the ending was more satisfying then the ending to crysis 1.
Saves: Crysis 2 uses a checkpoint system I have heard a lot of people call it consolized, however you have to remember Far Cry did not use quick saves either. I don't really have any feelings on this either way as while there checkpoints are a little unforgiving they to deny me the ability to quicksave spam (which is probably for the best considering I will save like 5 times a battle in a game with quicksave). If you have checkpoints you will probably find this a negative.
Game play Variety - I found that there was a good variety in scenarios. There were some scenarios that strongly favored sneaking around and either assassinating people one at a time while remaining undetected while there were other scenarios with constant streams of guys where wading into groups of dudes with a HMG was a great option. Overall I liked the variety and thought it accommodated a good deal of play styles. I thought game play had more variety then Crysis 1.
Linearity - The game is more linear then Crysis 1. For the most part it is a rail shooter without the huge jungles of Crysis 1 to sneak through. They do try to provide multiple options for a lot of the encounters, but it is still a little bit more of a rail shooter then Crysis 1.
Multiplayer:
I was not able to play multiplayer, but not for lack of trying. Every time I start up the game and go to multiplayer it asks me for a my serial key (I have now entered my serial key a good 15 times). Pretty much every server I join claims it is full, even if immediately after the refresh it only has 12/16 people in it. After 1 attempt any server that is not full will claim that my serial code is in use. I did manage to get into a server once, but I waited 5 minutes in the lobby and the game never started. I can do some evaution based of the demo however.
This is COD with supersuits. I don't mean it has similar game mods or anything like that, I mean it is pretty much exactly COD with super suits. Most of the suit modules directly mimic COD perks and the kill streaks are very similar as well. Again I have not played the full version so I cannot comment on the balance of the guns, but overall I thought it was fun. If you like COD multiplayer you will probably like Crysis 2 multiplayer, if you don't like COD then you probably won't like Crysis 2 multiplayer it's that simple. The Suit modes (Nanovision, cloak, armor) give it a very small amount of difference from COD, but not much.
I hope this is helpful to some people
*edited to change screenshots to links
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