Hi everyone. I've just played through it once, and am about halfway through my second time with the single player,and I've played around with the multiplayer a fair amount. Honestly, I have to say the more that I play it, the more disappointed I am. Crysis 2 is a good game. It's a well made and entertaining game, sure. However, everything that made Crysis and Crysis : Warhead fun and unique is reduced severely.

The immediate thing that everyone notices is the graphics. In the original Crysis, every single little detail was rendered with the highest resolution. You could lay on your stomach and admire a random little pebble as you wait for a patrol to go by, or examine even the utility boxes in a mining complex, and everything was perfectly done. In Crysis 2, obviously concessions were made for the xbox 360. Even seemingly important things like faces, vehicles and weapons are all lower resolution. It goes beyond textures as well, as things that were once fully rendered structures are often now just sprites or textures plastered onto the screen. Overall, Crysis 2 is a good looking game, but I wish they had just made it a separate game not part of the Crysis series. It makes it an obvious step backwards visually.

In a partial overlap with the graphics, much of the gameplay is a step backwards as well. While yes, the narrative is 'tighter'...that doesn't really mean better. Crysis was originally fun because it set you in an open area where virtually every object could be manipulated to your heart's content, and you could go about completing objectives virtually any way you wanted. Crysis 2 makes every single effort to hold your hand through every single thing. You enter an area a specific way, and the game tells you "HAY, TIEM TO PULL OWT YER BINOCULARS!" From there, you don't actually even need to see what you're aiming to tag, as the game already identifies all enemies and just tells you to 'click' on them to add them to your minimap. It seems redundant. If the suit is so advanced as to know an enemy behind 3 walls is there, why would I not want them on the map? Hand holding continues as the game also identifies what weapons and ammo are where, and then provides giant yellow icons that say "snipe them here!" "get ammo here!" "use this turret here!" All of this adds to the feeling that you're not creating a solution to a problem provided, you're choosing a predetermined path, and only doing exactly what the developers have already imagined for you. The interactivity of the world at large is severely reduced as well. Vehicles are less important, but also less well done. They're no longer objects with their own weight and physical characteristics and now just moving powerups. If you hit something a post at full speed with a giant tank, well, the tank stops dead. The creative use of objects in the game is seemingly lessened as well. Objects that can picked up and thrown are now hilighted...and others are completely immobile for seemingly no reason. While this doesn't have a huge impact on the gameplay at large, it does ruin the sense of freedom.

While the call of 'console port!' is kind of an annoying one, I have to agree. While its still a good game, and it looks pretty and plays well, it isn't Crysis. EVERY single concession imaginable was made in favor of xbox and ps3 players. There was no consideration given to PC users at all. Console players will have trouble manipulating weapons with complex dynamics? Make the weapons more arcade-like. Graphics and physics too complex for console hardware? Take it all a step back. Original game wasn't on consoles so players won't know everything about the first story? Forget everything that happened, start it over. While I look forward to seeing what the directx11 version will look like, this will not make Crysis 2 the rightful heir to Crysis. The problems are much more complex than that.

I wish people would review what games are rather than what they are not, all the marketing of Crysis 2 was nanosuit this and choreographed sandbox that, not heres crysis 1.5 (that was Warhead).

http://www.vg247.com/2010/09/24/crysis-2-is-a-choreographed-sandbox-title-says-yerli/

Basically the intent of crysis 2 is that it is a hybrid game design, which I honestly think they nailed, it reminds me of bioshock a linear progression (which crysis also had) but with multiple combat tactics (suit powers are like plasmids) based on stealth, armour and agility to traverse the gameplay space to gain an advantage against the odds.

Most complaints are misapprehensions of what the base idea was and I have no clue how anyone could have missed the point so hard considering the massive amounts of advertising this game got.

The hand holding is an issue, the tactical options are completly ignorable, but it's the "Assuming direct control" parts that ruin the first four or so missions, I understand why they did it, but it was really unsatisfying, it's certainly the weakest part of the game for me.

I agree, I love in crysis 1 as soon as you landed on the island you were able to access all your suit powers. Not being able to use cloak or armor during the beginning of the game, and hearing the suit voice talk too much really ruined it for me. I'm not an idiot, but crysis 2 definitely treated me like one. This game is so overly simplified and dumbed down it should not have been called crysis.