Thoughts on Crysis 2

So I finally got around to finishing Crysis 2 this past weekend and just wanted to share a couple of my thoughts in regards to how it measured up to the first. The first thing I'll address here is the undertones that I encountered throughout the game. Being a first person shooter typically guarantees a sub-par story and lackluster character design by falling into the pattern of face-less super soldier blows up gratuitous amounts of aliens. This held true for Crysis 2, you play as Alcatraz, just a normal marine who gets flung into this massive conflict between the Ceph and Humanity. The character from the first Crysis, Prophet, finds this random dying marine laying on the ground completely helpless and decides to give him a second chance at life as well as to complete his work and destroy the Ceph.

I thought that despite the main character being voice-less and face-less there was still some shred of purpose that he displayed over the course of the game. Even his name, Alcatraz, was symbolic of his situation in a pretty big way. You're essentially tossed into this super suit by no desire of your own and forced to fight your way through hordes of hardships all by yourself. You're trapped into a fight that wasn't your own, you're alone for the most part, and you can't get out of the suit no matter what happens to you (even when others try to get him out of it by force it doesn't work). You're essentially trapped in a cage fighting other people's battles the entire game, and while the thought of being trapped in a super nano suit that essentially makes you invincible may sound like the coolest prison experience ever, its still communicated in various ways that your will is never your own.

The game as whole was decently fun and the variation between the human opponents and the alien ones kept the levels interesting. I liked the original Crysis more than I liked this one just due to the way it was designed with an open world and a higher degree of freedom rather than what they did with Crysis 2, which took more of a Halo 2/3/Reach approach to things. You're given a moderate amount of freedom in how you'd like to complete your objectives via stealth or just plowing your way through hoards of opponents which is nice but it lacked the feel that the original had (more of a Far Cry feel).

That's all I have to say about Crysis 2. Its hard to make meaningful connections in a game that is centered on blowing jello-aliens up and running around with a super nano-suit.

-Fest