who might be interested...

I have sent my copy of Crysis 2 back to my retailer (god bless online retailing) for a refund. I thought I might post some blather about why I did it, on the off-chance that a developer or someone at Crytek might read it and... probably just ignore it, but oh well. It's cathartic for me, anyway.

I consider myself a pretty 'hardcoe' PC gamer, I play a lot of different PC games and spend way too much time playing them. Some of my favourite FPS games: Half-Life, Thief, Half-Life 2, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Modern Warfare 2 (multiplayer only), Doom/Quake/Doom 3, F.E.A.R., etc.

I played the original Crysis and enjoyed the hell out of it. For all the criticism it received, I thought it was a great game with an excellent approach to gameplay (open world sandbox style, nano-suit was an original and entertaining gameplay device) and ... well, *I* thought the story was great! The alien **** came out of nowhere and never seemed boring or tedious to me (apart from that **** swimming through the spaceship level.. ugh).

So I'm quite disappointed with Crysis 2 because you've taken several steps backwards in a few key areas, and completely changed things which didn't need changing at all.

1) The Nano Suit.

Microing the Nano Suit in Crysis 1 made me feel like a bad-ass. The gameplay thrills were CONSTANT in that game because of it. What HAVE you done? This is a Nano Suit for kids. It's utterly boring to use. Did you even playtest these changes before making them? You've taken the joy out of the suit, guys. And Maximum Armor is an active ability now? Wow. What a **** gameplay mechanic. I can no longer decloak, armor my way thru enemies then recloak. Versatility is GONE. I spend all my time hiding around corners waiting for my suit energy to regenerate, whether I'm sneaking OR going guns blazing. I don't feel like a bad-ass anymore... I feel like a coward =(

2) AI.

Not good enough. I'm talking about the way enemies zero in on your position from miles away, with no regard to how darkened your position is. I'm also talking about the way that enemies pick you out through solid objects or light cover such as foliage. Squad movement is virtually non-existent, and general AI movement svcks, with enemies running at the wrong moments, getting stuck, and just generally acting like idiots. It svcked in Crysis 1, and it still svcks. No progress made. Not even as good as games made years and years ago e.g. HL1.

3) Respawning enemies.

Set pieces have turned into an arcade game, with enemies spawning out of nowhere as soon as you kill their buddies. War of attrition is useless in this game because enemies just keep on coming. After a few hours of stealthing it up, trying to carefully take out key sentries and playing tactically, I was getting sick of to the back teeth of it.

4) Checkpoint save structure

...with not enough checkpoints. Retarded. Many times I was utterly frustrated and just ran guns blazing through set pieces like a retard just because I was sick of doing the same godamn thing over and over and then dying to the real challenge 5 mins further on.

5) Poor voice acting and script

Seriously bad script, seriously bad voice acting. All the way through, I kept thinking how much better this would have been if someone competent like Valve had done it. And I loved the first Crysis, story and all. And what the **** did you do with the suit voice? It went from sounding bad-ass to sounding crap. And it talks too damn much, do I really need a voice telling me every **** damn thing? Find other methods of unfolding plot than just the **** nano suit droning on about messages being intercepted or other such ****. I don't mean 'Maximum Armor' or that ****, that's cool, I'm talking about everything else. (Although you managed to **** ruin the suit voice anyway, so **** it, get rid of that too)

6) Hand-holding gameplay

Terrible, terrible hand-holding. Here's a message telling you how to **** crouch, here's one telling you how to look at an interesting event, **** OFF. Oh look, here's a gameplay device that REMOVES ALL NEED FOR ACTUAL THOUGHT. I don't even need to **** reflect on how to beat a set piece, because the **** game is telling me 'hey there's a flank right here and a stealthy bit right here'. **** suit might as well play the godamn game for me and save me the trouble. Ever hear of a game called Thief? I managed to play that game without a **** interface telling me where to go to get past guards and ****. Don't get me wrong, I know full well that your 'Retarded Drunken Frat-boy' demographic needs that **** in order to get past the first 10 minutes of the game, but give me the option to turn that **** off for the love of god because, more than anything else I've mentioned here, it RUINED THE GAME.

7) Forcing focus on the player unnecessarily

Hey Yosh, there's a big alien ship here. Look at the ship. There's a good boy. No, you can't look elsewhere, look at the **** SHIP. Similar to #6, except so utterly retarded that it needs a section all of its own. Let me look where the **** I want. I'm not a complete retard, I can hear that there's a fight going on over there, I know how to move the mouse, I will look at it myself. I don't need the **** camera FORCED onto events that you think I absolutely MUST watch. Cos, you know, half the **** pleasure is trying to notice all this **** happening. Have you guys ever played a game called Half-Life? Go play it now, and make notes.

Probably more I could say but I think that's enough.

Oh yeah and one more thing, I don't even care about the whole PC port issues. It's laughable that you didn't even include options in the menus to turn off antialiasing, motion blur etc, but thanks to this great gaming community I was able to use a third-party program to create an autoexec file to fix it all (at least you included console options, grateful for small mercies I suppose). Frankly I think port issues and bugs are the least of Crysis 2's problems.

I agree. Especially the storytelling and the plot (so far) itself. Crysis 1 handled it so much better. I too actually enjoyed Crysis 1's story and the way the plot developed throughout the game.

This isn't your personal blog. Move on already if you returned the game. No reason to still be here unless you have no life....

Hi do you suggest it to be buyed then ? I already cancelled the order for XBOX after seeing the MP DEMO , now I was just willing the sp And waiting for the pc version to come outto be able to mod it but I have read you can't mod it right?

This isn't your personal blog. Move on already if you returned the game. No reason to still be here unless you have no life....

But it is an open forum and the guy makes a good case. I agree on most of those points, but am not returning my game. I foolishly hope that some day this might be a working product.

Hi do you suggest it to be buyed then ? I already cancelled the order for XBOX after seeing the MP DEMO , now I was just willing the sp And waiting for the pc version to come outto be able to mod it but I have read you can't mod it right?

Ehm. What exactly do you want to mod?

I was able to get the game running adequately (e.g. no motion blur, settings calibrated to run max res without problems by fiddling with AA and other stuff) by using this:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1807934

I agree with all the guy said, and im thinking of returning the game.
But i still have hope on pathces and fixes... CryTek should say something.

Just thought I'd add my rather lengthy review/rant in here so hopefully CryTek might end up reading it and also to see if other people share my opinions. I've done a little reading on what other pc gamers think of Crysis 2 and my thoughts seem to be shared with a great many others. Please note there are a few small spoilers.

Basically I was a huge fan of Crysis 1 and while it wasn't perfect, I was easily able to look past the quite small negatives. After my fourth and fifth play-throughs of the singleplayer I'd basically forgotten what they were. I was one of those people who didn't just like Crysis for it's graphics, but also it's gameplay and story. I played Crysis for a good two years with dreams of one day being able to max those settings. Well, a few months ago I built that dream computer. I guess what I'm trying to say Crytek, is don't try and dismiss my opinion as 'just another hater' because I was genuinly one of your biggest supporters.

I played the pc demo and really enjoyed it, more than the original's multiplayer by a long way. My issues are completely with the singleplayer. I was really looking forward to this game and I preordered it. Yesterday I finished playing through Crysis 2 on normal difficulty and it took me just under seven hours. I have very very mixed feelings. I really enjoyed the game and I think it's really good but man does it have some big flaws that stop it from being the ultimate pc game at this point in time. Now I'm not one of those people who thinks that just because I play on pc there should be no such things as consoles. I'm all for Crysis 2 being on consoles but damn, if your going multiplatform don't make it so you screw over your valued fans and supporters by making the original platform version (i.e. PC) a mere shadow of what it could of been. Let me elaborate.

Graphics:

I know graphics aren't everything but when you release a game and its expansion with so much effort put into graphics that it becomes the main thing the franchise is know for, try and put in as much effort the second time round, hey? Crysis 2 looks very very good but it should be so much better. No DX11 is unacceptable and a rumoured post-release patch is no excuse. I don't care how good Crysis 2 looks, it gets marked down bigtime for no DX11. Secondly, Crysis 2 in my opinion is not as good looking/realistic as Metro 2033 which came out a year ago. Some aspects are better such as people's faces but for the most part Crysis 2 falls behind. Water in Crysis 2 looks nowhere near what it did in Crysis 1. What is happening Crytek!? Crysis is over three years old and it's sequel looks worse in some aspects! Textures also aren't good enough. Us Pc gamers expected Crysis 2 to be significantly ahead of the competition like it's prequel. I blame this on the fact that it has been developed with a focus on bringing the CryEngine 3 down to old console hardware and that has massively limited the graphics potential of the pc version. I had to use the EVGA SLi enhancement patch to enable SLi. Are you trying your hardest to annoy every single one of your pc fans CryTek?

Gameplay:

First I'll concentrate on the nanosuit. What the hell did you do? It's been dumbed down bigtime. If it was exactly the same as the nanosuit v1 but with the newer nano catalyst upgrades, nanovision and a few more of the newer additions it would have been perfect. Getting rid of speed and strength modes was the biggest mistake in Crysis 2 in my opinion. Crysis 1 was perfect in how you had to choose one suit mode and choose the perfect time and place to use it. You had to balance your suit energy all the time which made the game constantly exciting. Now you've boiled down speed and strength modes, which were just as important as strenth and cloak, into 'strong melee' and 'fast sprint'. Strength mode has been dubmed down into a higher jump than the normal jump and a stronger melee than the normal melee. It's just a single button press, there's no finesse anymore with the suit menu. Same with speed, it's just a faster sprint (which is far slower than speed mode sprint in Crysis 1 for some strange stupid reason). Sure, you can use strength and speed at the same time as armour and cloak now, but I think that it's worse. There's no excitement of having to make a tactical choice based on the situation of which single mode you are going to use. Also, speed mode used to speed up everything such as reload times and speed mode walking was as fast as non-speedmode sprinting. All that is gone now and it's dumbed down to a simple 'sprint' key.

I don't like how the health bar is gone and has been replaced with a Call of Duty style regenerating health system. It's too generic. The health and energy bar combo from the first game worked much better. I also don't like how armour mode drains energy even when you aren't being shot. Cloak mode has been reduced in effectiveness aswell so no longer are you completely invisibale at all times. Enemies can now see you if you are close to them and they are alerted to your presence.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that you changed the nanosuit way too much. If Crysis was real life there's no way the nanosuit would have been changed into its second version. The original nanosuit could jump higher, run faster, was more invisible and armour mode lasted indefinitely. It makes no sense why they would release a second version that is so inferior to the original. Forget my gripes with the graphics, this is my main complaint about the game and is its biggest negative by far.

I hated not being able to aim down the sights of a gun while using a laser sight. You could in the original and as soon as I tried it out for the first time in Crysis 2 I immediately removed it from my gun and never used it again for the rest of the game. Duel wield pistols was also gone which I was disappointed to see because it meant I had no interest whatsoever in using pistols.

The cover system was ok in some ways but I still would have prefered the game without it. This made it feel like a console game, pc first person shooters generally don't have cover systems and I like it better that way. In the heat of combat they get in the way and are annoying as you often accidently find yourself stuck in the cover system when you never intended to use it. A manual lean funtion would have been far better but obviously the q and e keys are normally used for that and they are now occupied with the new armour and stealth keys which should have remained in the radial suit menu.

The location of New York is ok, it's pretty good I guess but it really is nowhere near as fun as the tropical island was. I think that you should have designed the levels to be even more open. The great sandbox feel of the original game is gone. Now it feels like your standard linear shooter with above average size levels and some cool toys to play around with. If we'd had access to most floors of the buildings that woud have been far better. In most cases we have access to a small intersection, courtyard or rooftop but it's not large enough.

I miss not being able to attach a sniper scope to weapons such as the SCAR. I don't always want to carry around a dedicated sniper rifle due to the lower ammo capacity and lack of full auto so in the first game using an assault rifle with attached sniper scope worked very well when using strength mode to steady the shot, going prone and using semi-auto. But alas, no more strength mode, no more prone, no more sniper scopes on assualt rifles and last but certainly not least, no more sniping fun.

Story:

The story for the most part is quite good, certainly better in some aspects than the original. I do think that you could have implemented even more of it into the game however. While I didn't find the first few hours of the game boring and repeditive like some reviewers did, I think that some extra story added in here would have helped. I also didn't like the ending all that much. Not the part where you take out the spore thing in central park, that was good. More the epilogue part where Alcatraz says "They call me Prophet". It was confusing and doesn't explain much at all. The story from the original game could have been woven in a bit more too. All Crysis 2 does is mention "the lingshan incident' and leaves it at that. It creates more question than it answers by far. What happened to Nomad after he went back to the island with Prophet? What did they do at the island. How come the aliens have been forgotten about for three years? Why are these aliens different from the ones in the first game? There are so many extra things that could have easily been put into the game, even if it was simply told to you by the characters such as Prophet and Gould.

'Consolification':

I just invented a new word to try and explain what I think has been done to the pc version of Crysis 2. It has been made to feel very much like a console game. It does not feel like a pc game anymore. I enjoy some console games but when I buy a pc game from a traditionally pc franchise to play on a pc, I want it to feel like a pc game. The 'press enter' thing at the menu I don't care for but it's not a big issue either. What's far worse is the absence of graphics options in the menu. Big mistake. These days I can max every game on my gaming rig but before I had that beast of power I had to be very very economical with my framerate. In Crysis 1 I was constantly fiddling with settings trying to get an extra 1 to 2 frames here or there. That is no longer an option and it just isn't good enough for a pc game. What's more is it adds to the console feel of the game.

The simplification of the nanosuit as I mentioned under gameplay also feels like it has been done to dumb down the game to console controllers with their limited number of buttons. This may not be the case but us pc gamers see consoles as simpler versions of computers and so if a sequel is released that is simpler than the original and it isn't a good thing, we know what to blame.

I was one of those people who used the Sandbox 2 editor. I even created a map as a school project which ended up getting me a good enough score to get into university. No editor at launch and perhaps never is a big big letdown for the crysis 2 pc community. No maps or mods?, but that's what makes pc gamers different from console gamers. We have a level of interaction with the game far above that of the consoles. Crysis 2 missed the boat on this one.

No dev console. Minor but still is another thing that makes it feel like it isn't a pc game anymore.

Bugs:

Crysis 1 had some small bugs here and there such as the rather funny deadly barrels that would kill you if you so much as touched them. Crysis 2 has far bigger problems. I won't go into all the game codes/accounts/multiplayer bugs because I haven't had any experience with those yet but I do want to point out the singeplayer bugs. The main one is with nano catalyst. I discovered at one point towards the end of the game that I lost all my nano catalyst that I had collected. This was a decently large amount of several thousand. I also noticed that during that level, no matter how much catalyst I collected, none of it was tallied so I could spend it. I had to quit the game and start it up again to fix the problem. This bug meant that by the end of the game I was unable to purchase all the suit upgrades. I also had another problem that required me to quit the game to fix, which happened to be the laser dot from the reflex sight disappearing.

Final Thoughts:

After reading all that it sounds like I hate the game, but I really don't. For the most part if is excellent and it was highly enjoyable, sadly for all the wrong reasons. It was fun in a new non-Crysis way. It didn't feel like a Crysis game much at all. Every character is new except for Prophet, even the aliens are new/different. The only way the story connects to the first game is the fact that there is Prophet, some aliens and a mention once or twice of the lingshan islands. That's it.

The guns are fun and certainly better than in the original but as I mentioned, things such as the new laser sights and no sniper scopes on assualt rifles do hurt the gunplay. The graphics are good but not what the could have been. The story was very good but too confusing at times, created more questions than it answered and was under-utilised making it a good story but not one that can compete with Deus Ex 1 or Half Life 2.

After the bad job with the new nanosuit, the console feel of the game is the next worst thing. Need I repeat myself? I think to emphasise my point I must. No DX10/11. No SLi support. No custom graphics settings. No map editor. No next-gen graphics, just worse-than-year-old graphics. The list goes on. What's worse it the fact that all this combied with the general console feel of the game would have been totally avoided if Crytek had remained pc exclusive or at the very least remained completely pc oriented and released the game on pc first in the best possible way they could and only then ported it to consoles. If they couldn't do that then make a seperate game for consoles. All you have done Crytek is make the pc version feel like a completely new console game with some elements that makes it feel like it has a few similarities to the first game. The story doesn't link with the original much, the nanosuit if very different and inferior and the game no longer feels like a pc game.

I enjoyed the game very much but for different reasons than I enjoyed the first game. It should not be called Crysis 2, it should be called something else that's just 'set in the Crysis universe'. I give it an 8/10 because it was so fun but it could have been a 9.5 or 10 if you had simply kept strength and speed modes and made it into a true pc game with DX11, a dev console, a map editor, SLi support, next gen graphics and all those other things I talked about.