Well, yesterday I just decided that I would complete Crysis 2. I have had it for a couple of weeks and have not been able find time to play it. The story goes like this; I bought a new computer nearly 4 years ago and then bought Crysis for it in hope that it would run it. It didn’t. My graphics card was shit and I couldn’t play on any more than every graphics setting being at low. However, when I got my new computer about a month ago, with a GTX 480 card, I was able to experience some amazing gameplay and graphics in Crysis. So I bought Crysis 2.
I thought I’d review it. This may contain spolers for people, maybe not. I will try not to spoil anything I promise, and will highlight spoilers with red text.
So if you have played Crysis 2, you will agree with me first of all, especially my fellow PC Gamers, that the graphics are indeed amazing. What’s more, you can download two further graphical upgrades which I will explain. First of all, you can download a high-resulution texture pack. This is good, because while graphics settings are at the Ultra setting, you can still see some textures which could be a little bit nicer looking. It doesn’t cost much more GPU power either. This pack has it’s drawbacks though, because first of all, you need to download the 1.5 GB installer. Secondly, this upgrade is only for 64-bit Operating Systems. So if you’re like me, you might have just wasted 1.5 GB of internet resources to download something that doesn’t work on a 32-bit OS. But it’s free, so we can’t exactly complain!
The second graphical additional download is a DirectX 11 Upgrade, namely the demanding feature known as tessellation. For those who don’t know, tessellation basically makes flat blocks look more bumpy and raised, overall making the game look even more realistic. Good things about this? You can experience a really realistic looking enhancement to an already beautiful game. It is also only about 700 MB to download, so only half of what the Hi-res texture pack is. Finally, it works with 32-bit Operating Systems. However, as you may have guessed, it requires a lot of GPU power, and even my GTX 480 cannot handle it. My healthy 70FPS drops to an unplayable 20FPS when I turn tessellation on.
And of course, if you’re not able to get either of these upgrades, you can still be sure that the game is pretty without these two enhancements!
But, as I always say, a game shouldn’t be reputable because of its graphics, so here goes.
Crysis 2′s story is somewhat similar to the original game’s story, in that a certain place in the world is being invaded by the aliens which have been on Earth for thousands of years. I quite liked the original game’s story, because I honestly hadn’t a clue that there were aliens involved at all. It was a very nice surprise to me, because that just made it my type of game, and made me want to get it completed faster. So yes, I quite like the storyline of the second game as well. One of the reasons being how much you find out about what happened in the first game, and especially more about Prophet.
One thing I think could have been improved, if even a little bit, was how they developed the main characters. I’m satisfied with Alcatraz, even though there isn’t much to know about him. We already know about Prophet from the first game, and I was also satisfied with the way they developed him even more, although I’m not quite sure about him returning to the living after putting a bullet in his own head! However, the rest of the characters need to be developed a little bit more, over a longer period of time.
Sounds and music are another contrubuting factor to the atmosphere of the game. Let’s take Amnesia: The Dark Descent. While developing it, Frictional Games created atmospheric music for different parts of the game; a calm level would have very soothing music, just after an adrenaline-rushing level which has very fast chase-like music. I think in Crysis 2, the sadder parts of the game could have had some better music to fit it, for example when you are trying to get over the bridge near the end, and the Prism building explodes. You see a woman inside a traincart, you try to grab her hand but miss. This sort of scenes are what I mean by “sad” scenes in the game.
Overall, I think Crysis 2 was a very good game, quite enjoyable to play and big on graphics.
My suggestion is that if you are a graphics geek with a GTX 590 or two, download those two graphics enhancements and play the game. It would satisfy your realistic graphics hunger, I am sure of that. If you are into modern combat games, you could probably get some enjoyment out of singleplayer, and definately some enjoyment out of multiplayer. If you like good storylines, you should also play this.
