“Your obscene cyborg dreams” – Crysis 2

**Crysis 2** (Crytek/EA, Xbox 360, 2011)

First-person shooters took over as one of the leading genres of games in the UK in the early 2000s. This accelerated as part of the Xbox 360’s success, and accompanying swing towards online multiplayer and away from games by Japanese developers. Even in that context, 2011 was quite the new high water mark. No fewer than six of them reached #1 in the UK charts, 25% of all the year’s chart-toppers. That made it harder for any one game to stand out, but some still did, sometimes in ways that pointed to possible futures.

Crysis 2 coming out a week after Homefront means it’s where I highlight 2011’s equivalent to 2005’s dual customisable street racing games soundtracked by Kasabian’s “Club Foot”. Both Homefront and Crysis 2 are set around a decade in the future. Both open with mocked up news footage to introduce their dystopia, and both overlay it with a permanent prompt to press A to skip to the action, clearly expecting a large number of players not to bother watching.

In both cases, the news includes an item about the price of gasoline, and how it is breaking “the dreaded $x barrier”. From which, as well as a sense of deadening familiarity, we can take the quantifiable conclusion that Crysis 2’s dystopia ($200) is an order or magnitude more dreaded than Homefront’s ($20). This time the enemy is not North Korea, although it’s worth noting that for a decent proportion of the original Crysis, it actually was North Korea too.

For all that some of the similarity hinges on coincidence, there’s something real in there about how much Crysis 2 is happy to hit familiar narrative beats in familiar ways. In practice its plot owes at least as much to [Prototype], with its alien infection, enhanced humans and bodily sacrifice. Either way, its narrative is weak and it palpably knows it. The breathy robotic voice which tells you what to do stays as resolutely focused on actions and objectives as those cutscene skip prompts.

There are two things that Crysis 2 has going for it instead. The first, which I was expecting by reputation, is that it looks great. Playing on the Xbox 360, its looks can’t be quite as strong as the PC version (there’s a nod to the power demands of that in the first achievement being called “Can it run Crysis?”). It’s still as technically impressive as the PS3 Killzone games, even while having a much wider variety of settings and ideas. I found myself stopping to look at piled up bags of rubbish because each one of them was so perfectly visually realised.

Visual detail means little on its own beyond a sense of polish. The impressive thing is that Crysis 2 produces it without funnelling the player down a corridor like so many of its contemporaries. Its stealth and armour modes, giving you limited opportunities to be nearly invisible or invincible, open up tactics even as the action goes quickly. You can pick off enemies, tank your way straight through groups of them, or look around for tunnels and bypass the combat completely.

One time I took a high-up side route and got spotted, and the meticulously detailed advertising boards I was crouching behind turned out to be unfortunately flimsy and destructible. As I got killed it felt like a bigger turnaround because the very fact I was somewhere I didn’t even need to be had given me a false sense that it wouldn’t operate by the same full rules. The flexibility makes it a power fantasy backed up by actual agency within gameplay, rather than solely the impression of it.

The freedom and the visual wow of Crysis 2 add something to playing it. They’re nicer to have than not. They ultimately don’t do much for the gameplay that Halo didn’t already do, and doesn’t make it a compelling experience in the absence of other important elements, but it makes it stand out from the likes of Homefront. Visual polish and freedom are exponentially difficult things to improve together, though. At a bigger industry scale, honing in on that was always doomed to be a challenge which would escalate as technology advanced. Dystopian futures and out-of-control costs awaited.