Crysis 2 was the medicine I needed. After the early onset of boredom with Halo Reach multiplayer, and boredom crushing my will to live before I’d even finished Call of Duty Black Ops campaign, I wasn’t looking forward to reviewing Crysis 2. Oh me of little faith. The energy and sheer glistening beauty of Crysis 2 has given me a new lease of life on the FPS front.  It’s the first must buy shooter of 2011.

I should preface by mentioning I played the original Crysis in passing on a friends tricked out PC and as such don’t have the colon compacting sense of betrayal many PC gamers do at Crytek for daring to make a cross platform game. The game is far more A to B movement compared to the wide world approach of Crysis, with packets of terrain to play around and tactically experiment. It’s not quite as funnelled as Call of Duty but it’s no where near as open world as Farcry 2 or the original Crysis. So yes, there are levels tailored to objectives required to progress, but you’re given a few different options to tackle these levels. There’s still more variation to Crysis 2 than the average shooter.

The Ceph are one of the more unique alien antagonists we've seen in the deluge of scifi shooters this generation

So, plot. Maybe my standards are too low but I enjoyed the Crysis storyline a great deal. New York has been stricken with an alien plague unleashed by the Ceph, the cephalopod aliens from the original Crysis. You play as a Marine Recon soldier sent into New York to meet with Nano suit wearing soldier Prophet, your characters CO in the original game.  After a Ceph attack destroys the submarine you were aboard you’re rescued by Prophet, half dead from being infected by the Ceph virus. He outfits your broken body in the Nanosuit and charges you to find Nathan Gould before blowing his own brains out. From there the game twists and turns like crazy with barely a moment to catch your breath. The structure of the plot reminded me a lot of Half Life 2 which I presume is about the best compliment you can give a shooter game.

The game frequently reminds you through its gameplay and tactical options that you are a super powered bad ass whom less soldiers should tremble before

If you’ve played a shooter in the last five years the controls should be quick to adjust too with the familiar Call of Duty setup of sights on the left trigger and shooting on the right. Grenades have been dropped from their hallowed position as a bumper button and made a selectable weapon to make way for the two main suit powers, invisibility and hardened armour. But it’s a fair trade as you’ll be using these powers a lot. Super jump, super sprint and melee can be activated by clicking the left stick while moving or holding down the bash or jump buttons. Picking up samples from dead aliens earns you credit to upgrade your suits abilities and unlock new ones. A handy early game unlock lets you see bullet trails so you can locate your aggressor much more quickly.

Using a red dot sight along with invisibility and all your super jumping just adds to the Predator vibe

To succeed in most fire fights you’ll often play sneaky, using invisibility to hit and run enemies one at a time and escape from flanking enemies. Essentially you become the Predator which, naturally, is awesome. If a large cluster of enemies is just calling out for an overkill you can always tear a mounted machine gun from its mooring, leap onto a truck, switch to armour mode and blast down on the suckers like the wrath of god. You can also customise your guns with various additions like silencers, different scope types and grenade or shotgun addons to give you more options to tackle objectives. Rather than a sniper level or an explosive level, Crysis 2 really hands the reins over and says ‘here are the bad guys, here are some suggestions in the form of yellow ‘tactical targets’, go nuts’.

Hot damn this game is gorgeous, even the console version (Xbox 360) which I did the majority of my playthrough on is super pretty and the will likely be the best looking FPS game you play this year. The detail and various particle and light effects that make the game so damn pretty do have a price. The game can lag at times and I experienced an above average incidence of complete lock up that I haven't experienced since Fallout 3 on the Xbox. The game is still meant to be a PC title and will tax your console to its limits, installing it might be a good option if you plan on logging extended hours with the game.

The multiplayer has that 'Just one more game' draw that makes Call of Duty such a compelling online game

Multiplayer is excellent. It's a perfect mix of the super powers and clip emptying shoot outs of Halo with the frantic energy of Call of Duty. There's also an unlock system similar to CoD's with experience and bonuses for challenges used to unlock new weapons and weapon add ons along with customisable class slots. In fact it seems like they've cheekily ripped off CoD's multiplayer options whole heartedly. Of course being a mix of both games there's a good chance the multplayer may put off people from both camps. But from playing two many hours of both games online I found the mash up provided one of the best multiplayer experiences on any console. One of the nicest features is a gated playlist for players below level 10 to let noobish players sand down their rough edges before they get butchered by more advanced players. The fact every single Nano suit ability from the single player is available in the multi is excellent. Once you get bitten by the bug you could lose many nights to Crysis 2 online.

My first complaint against the game would have to be the limited range of bad guys. The Cell soldiers only come in a few flavours and the Ceph don’t have a lot of variety either. While varying your tactics with the nano suit is a core focus of the game it’s more out of fun than a natural response to possible different threats. The enemy AI is very clever right up until it isn’t. A particular AI breaking issue is the stealth ability. While most of the time enemies will see you if you get to close to them there are times when you decloak in their line of sight and they walk right past you; even spasmodically bumping into you to push past. There are pathing issues as well with enemies running into corners and obstacles and getting stuck.

The Heavy Ceph is that enemy you've been saving all your explosives for, don't hesitate to drop every grenade, C4 pack and rocket you have on the mofo

There are also a few graphical glitches, mostly down to floating bodies and items. An exciting moment was ruined for me as a result of one glitch; just before encountering my first Ceph soldier. After an explosion I moved out into the dusty streets to find the enemy vehicle that had been outside gone, but the driver still there, floating in mid air, clutching an invisible steering wheel like he was about to sing a Wiggles song. For a game that’s technically impressive and eye caressingly beautiful ninety eight percent of the time, crappy AI and graphical glitches like this are much more noticeable and pull you right out of the game atmosphere. As mentioned before the game taxes the hardware far more than any game I can think off before it, and it pushes so hard that a few times you see the seams, but it's a fair price to pay.

The explosive effects are so gorgeous in Crysis 2 you can't resist throwing a few rockets around

What really tweaks my large number of obscure buttons about Crysis 2 is the fact it’s a complete package. For years we’ve had to contend with great FPS titles with either the single or multiplayer coming off as average, one always shadowing the other. Even in my overblown infatuation with the Halo universe I have to admit they criminally under explore the universe they’ve created in their single player campaigns and treat their audience just a leeetle stupid with their story lines. But Crysis 2 is the big hairy business. A single player campaign that’s a roller coaster of super powered fun and a multiplayer with enough unlockable ranks and customisation to keep CoD fans poo talking each other for months. Crysis 2 isn’t breaking out of its pants with any exciting innovations, like its main competitor titles this year Brink and Deus Ex, but it distils everything that’s made shooters the genre of dominance this century and serves up a tonic of pure joy for fans of guns and explosions.