This is an awesome sequel to Crysis and Warhead. What has always been the fear has been the hardware requirements. Would you actually be able to play it at a decent framerate? We all remember how Crysis 1 was a state of the art benchmark test when it was released and later became an awesome game as well when hardware power increased.
My current config is this, for comparison:
- Intel Core I7 2.66ghz
- GTX 285 overclocked black edition
- 12 Gb RAM
- Raid-0 WD Raptor discs
To be honest this machine was sometimes stressed out to the extreme in Crysis 1 at a nice resolution of 1920x1080. It performed well enough in Warhead though.
But the real question remained: would it actually be able to run Crysis 2 without me buying a brand new expensive graphics card? It's not like the GTX 285 is a weak card, not even today. The question is easily answered: Crysis 2 performs like a motherfucker. I never experienced any slowdowns at all, not even in massive fights with tons of enemies. I had the settings at "Very High" throughout the game. I did see 2 or 3 crashes along the way. But I have never played an entire game without a crash, so that doesn't worry me too much.
The single player campaign is excellent and takes some time to play thru. If you set the difficulty rather low it never gets too hard and you'll get a lot of time to enjoy and study the stunning graphics along the way. A change is that you can't see clear 12 kms away like you could in Crysis 1. Instead you'll get a much smoother running engine and a much more effective gameplay.
It really looks stunning running around in New York under the alien attack. For the first half of the game you mostly fight against a human force and in the second half it is mostly aliens. The aliens are much more interesting than in the first Crysis game where they really began to bore me to death and piss me off after a while.
The nano-suit controls have been simplified somewhat and is mostly down to armor and stealth(invisible) mode. Running and jumping is built into normal FPS controls behavior. A new feature is that you'll get alien points after killing aliens. These can then be exchanged into more sophisticated nano-suit powers like better stealth abilities etc.
Crysis 2 is an awesome game and I will soon be onto my second journey thru the single player campaign. This time on a more appropriate and hardcore level.
I never talk about multi-player gaming. I don't care about it so go find out yourself. Maybe it is awesome as well.
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Content Type: Game Review
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Updated: 2011-05-27 22:10
Created: 2011-05-24 18:48
