ooooh shiny .... WAAAAIT A MINUTE !!!!! .... NO DX 11?
Prophet survived the Lingshan Island according to Crysis 2 story in which he went AWOL during the last scenes in Crysis. Crysis 2 story is about the rise of the Cephs or Cephalopods in New York and one protagonist's mission to save the city. New York City is under siege and the nanosuit is your only hope of fighting back the deadly virus unleashed by aliens who were here before us buried deep in the earth. They are here and doing some house cleaning. We are the roaches in the fridge. Prophet gives the protagonist the suit and the fight begins with unbelievable carnage seen around this gorgeous rendering of New York City. The story goes deeper and I beg you to complete at least 75% of the single player campaign before casting your stone.
Crysis 2 has some amazing shooting mechanics and they feel heavy and powerful. Level design is one of the best I have seen for a shooter with the landscape changing before your eyes. The game is linear in some places and open in some. With so much devastation in the City, routes will be difficult to find and hence the linearity. In some cases, the game opens up to some very good vistas that give you tactical advantage over your foes. The nanosuit enhances this advantage with stealth mode. Stealth mode enables you to become invisible but not if you are 2 meters away from the enemy. The best way to reduce stealth energy usage is by crouching and I was crouching all the time. In fact you can play the entire game cloaked if you wanted you. The suit also gives you the ability to mark points in the map for tactical advantage like ammo dumps, stealth areas, observations areas and so on.
If you are caught with your pants down, you can activate maximum armor to absorb the bullets directed towards you. Maximum armor can also save you from falling from heights if necessary. Crysis stealth, speed, armor, strength modes were all separate but in Crysis 2, stealth and armor are separate but speed is automatic when you press the SHIFT button. Some will call this dumbing down but I call it efficiency and effectiveness but the speed is slower here. You can still grab enemies and fling them around if they come too close by pressing F.
Customisations return to guns and armor enhancements at your fingertips. Just like in Crysis, you can add silencers on the fly, shotguns and scopes. I prefer it without the silencers because of the sound. Armor enhancements are upgradable only by killing cephs and collecting the crystals dropped. A.I. in this game is not what I expected because they tend to run around in circles. They also take cover and flank you when necessary but we have seen this in so many games except for the excellent A.I in the first FEAR game
Multiplayer is decent enough to warrant investment of time levelling up and unlocking new weapons and other combat paraphernalia. The nanosuit brings enough decent gameplay to the playground which conceals and extends your capability in the battlefield. The main draw for me is the map variety and the level-up you get for using armor or stealth when killing your enemy. This is a good multiplayer
Crysis 2 is not DX 11 out of the box. Graphically, Crysis is far more superior to the second with high resolution textures, with huge maps and long draw distances as far as the eye can see. The beauty of the first game was that you were given options to adjust textures, motion blur, physics, shaders, etc. Crysis 2 is bare which is insulting to all PC gamers and the fact that it is DX 9. Although the lack of support for DX 11 is very annoying, the game looks gorgeous with the extreme pre-set adding antialiasing to smooth things up. Sound on the other hand is phenomenal with city echoes and explosions that will blow your speakers away.
Crysis 2 is a gorgeous, meticulously crafted shooter that tells a good story about the fight for survival of the human race. I bought it and you should too no matter the platform