Crysis 2

[Goza]

Now with less tropical island, and more New York!

While I enjoyed FarCry, IMO Crysis1 (non expansion) was pretty shit: unfriendly controls and especially crap gameplay, and you also needed some mainframe from the future to play it.

Crysis 2 now turns out to be pretty awesome. It runs absolutely smooth on my 2,5 year old rig (Radeon 4870) on 1920x1080 while looking splendid. The internet apparently rages a bit about low resolution textures and that Crytek sold out to consoles - dunno what crack those trolls are on, I seriously can't see any gfx problems.
You should definitely get it on PC thou: I also played the Xbox360 version, and it's lower, scaled up resolution kinda gave me eyecancer. The PC version is way superior due to native high res.

Regarding gameplay: excellent level design, the maps usually play in open arenas, giving you several routes to progress/fight. Fights & KI "feel real".
Again, the internet rages about "omg NYC corridor, where is my freeroam island?". Well, IIRC, that was already lost in Crysis1, which put a lot of artificial walls around you, all the time.

KI is good, but there's the typical lack of enemy variety: As in every other "modern setting shooter" (CoD, MoH ), you have the "evil soldiers", Crysis 2 just adds some alien grunts. Same with weapons: They are "just good": Machine gun, sniper, shotgut, grenades... (the usual stuff), plus some alien guns.

Btw, those screenshots look quite blurry, I have no clue which version they were taken of. The game is crisp sharp on my system, however I dunno how to create screenshots from it.

[Doomslay]

cryengine never fails to look amazing.
downloading this currently.

[Yjnar]

Played the game abit last weekend and I have to say that its pretty amazing. The game engine is really well optimized and runs well on even lower end systems.

[Tynx]

Played about 4 hours on the 360 (housemate dl'd it so we could give it a bash), I enjoyed it, got it for PC now, will be completing it soon. Really nice graphics and enjoyable gameplay, have to agree on the lack of opponents. Really like customising your guns for different environments and surroundings, power moves are great for creating your own cover and doing mad stuff. The level with the heat sensor where you can't see due to dust was quite fun and I enjoyed the cloak and stealthing. Getting into vehicles was funny and unexpected, dunno if it's actually useful later on in the game.

I think I may have rated the game a bit more than others as I didn't play Crysis 1 so it wasn't like, lol more of the same etc. Also I haven't played an FPS game for some time so this was really quite refreshing.

I'd give 7.5/10.

[Kawe / Dave]

I feel that it's a superior game to the first one in various ways; the story feels more like a story that might be interesting, the setting is more relatable to most comfy westerners, and the music is just far and away superior. While the graphics are, as expected, beautiful, there are definitely some concessions made to consoles, and some of the most extreme levels of detail/'realness' have been shaved off. Faces in particular are not quite as stupendously impressive as in the original. But given just how much more willing the game is to run on non hypertechnology I think it was a very good tradeoff that's nearly all benefit.

The combat is really, again, one of the greatest parts of the game. The nanosuit powers are more 'streamlined' in their usage this time; while this does limit a little some of the options, it's nothing massive and nothing that really hurts enjoyment of the game. The new controls really make utilising the suit's mixed capabilities together far simpler and more fun. The corridor claims do have a grain of truth to them but the actual areas where your combat is carried out in are generally quite open with various options for combat.

I've been streaming my playthrough of Crysis 2, and will continue today/tonight.

http://www.justin.tv/toastcleaner/ for the stream and http://www.justin.tv/toastcleaner/b/282461963 for a whopping four-and-a-half-hour session (well, more like 4 hours. I started watching some day9 daily at the end so that's in there for a bit too...). My first half hour of playthrough is at this link: http://www.justin.tv/toastcleaner/b/282451431 BUT for whatever reason, the stream was lagging/stuttering quite a bit then. But it's there.

Oh, and as a side note: booting cars into people is silly and funny. As is grabbing man and alien alike before hurling them away.

[Ino]

First singleplayer game I've played in ages, really fun so far. From watching Kawe and comparing it to what I did you can do all sorts of things to engage the enemy which is really cool.

[Kawe / Dave]

Third section of playthrough; this one's an hour long.
http://www.justin.tv/toastcleaner/b/282504547

Some very cool big enemy in this section.

[Narw]

Im thinking this is best single player shooter since Half Life 2. At least i dont remember any other fps game giving me so much fun like this one. It also looks amazing and runs amazing on my 2 years old computer.

[Daekesh]

Gotta have a good story too if u want to say that!

[Rash]

I didn't like the singleplayer all that much, probably because I sucked at that tactical mode. But game looks pretty!