// PC GAMER — GAMING
Crysis 2 had problems, but it got one thing right: destruction
Fancy a second helping of Crysis 2's big apple crumble?
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From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer (UK) #279.
Reinstall invites you to join us in revisiting PC gaming days gone by. Today, Rick revisits the gorgeous mess that is Crysis 2.
Crysis 2 gets a lot wrong. Its AI is criminally stupid. Its story is a convoluted mess. Its characters are hackneyed archetypes. Worst of all, its narrower environments and more limited nanosuit restrict the potential for emergent play, which was the essence of the original game. As far as sequels go, many of Crytek's design decisions for Crysis 2 are utterly baffling.
Yet for all its mistakes, Crysis 2 gets one thing right: destruction. From its low-key beginning to its apocalyptic final act, this grim fairytale of New York is a master-class in disaster fiction. If you embrace this theme of obliteration rather than fighting it, Crysis 2 is at times even more enjoyable than the original.
The game puts you in the boots of US marine and personality vacuum Alcatraz. Within five minutes he’s seen half his platoon massacred by the alien menace known as the Ceph, been shot half to pieces himself, and been given the task of saving New York by Prophet, the nanosuited squad leader from Crysis 1.
Crytek recognised that the most interesting aspect of the first game was the nanosuit, and so built Crysis 2's story almost entirely around it. The nanosuit is the game's real hero, synthesising a cure for the alien virus as the story progresses.
Alcatraz is merely a bag of leaky meat who provides the suit with locomotive abilities to get from objective to objective. Our FPS protagonists are often defined by their suits and little else (Half-Life and Halo are two notable examples) so why not give the suit some of the credit for once?
The nanosuit is the hero, Alcatraz a bag of leaky meat