(reposting as I reviewed a different version of the game from the one I played)

The graphics are still good I suppose.

The openness of the encounters and the satisfying guns are still fun to this day. You can rush straight in, sneak through the bushes and take the enemy by surprise, circle around with a boat, or my favorite strategy, ram through an enemy roadblock with a truck. And there are even more possibilities than that, thanks to the robust physics and the game's signature feature, the cloak. There's more expression here than in many other shooters.

Though your soldier allies will frequently advise a stealthy approach, stealth is basically nonexistent as enemies can see very long distances and there is no investigation state when enemies get even the tiniest glimpse of your nanosuited ass; they go from completely unaware of your presence straight to full alert. The cloak is more for repositioning than stealth. I notice a lot of fans raving about how you can use stealthy tactics but I found stealth borderline unusable, which really bummed me out. I still had fun thinking up tactics on the fly however.

Unfortunately everyone is correct when they say Crysis drops off quite hard. I didn't hate the final levels as much I thought I would, but it's undeniably a front-loaded game. The zero-G and VTOL sections were the worst parts for me though. Just shooting aliens wasn't too bad. It was still a competent shooter at the end; it just lacked the tactical and expressive gameplay that kept the game on the map when "but can it run Crysis?" wasn't funny anymore.

(reposting as I reviewed a different version of the game from the one I played)

It's one of the seventh gen shooters of all time.

Given the resounding disappointment surrounding Crysis 2 after Crysis 1 was such a boundary pushing game for the time, I expected a lot less of this game. But while it does feel stripped back compared to its predecessor, there is still merit in this game's ideas.

It's certainly nothing to write home about, and could easily get lost in the seventh gen sea of brownish shooters, but it's a fairly solid campaign with some fun setpieces that make it feel like an action movie. And the remastered graphics look excellent. Somehow this game got a much better remaster than Crysis 1 did, despite that game having a legendary reputation for its graphics.

While Crysis 2 lacks the open world design of Crysis 1, the levels are still built to allow multiple approaches. I found the cloak to be much more useful and fun in Crysis 2, but in both games I found armour mode underwhelming. I rarely used it tactically; it was more of a necessity to not die in a matter of seconds against certain enemies.

The much maligned aliens are back in Crysis 2, but I found them to be a lot more enjoyable to fight this time around because they're on the ground and use tactics like cover and cloaking, rather than flying space jellyfish that you just empty endless rounds into with little strategy or creativity involved. I got the feeling that the developers may have taken some inspiration from Halo for the aliens in this game. One thing that was not inspired however, was the AI. Both the aliens and humans have really stupid AI and it feels like a missed opportunity to make firefights more dynamic and tactical. Sometimes they would just stand there trying to figure out where I went.

Though I did find the remaster job better this time around, one issue I ran into was some severe slowdowns in the level Masks Off. It was only limited to this level, but it affected the gameplay experience quite badly.

There isn't really anything wrong with Crysis 2; it only suffers from sharing a name with a much more ambitious and unique game. Though it didn't reach the highs of Crysis 1, it avoided the lows and was a more consistent experience overall. The last third or so of Crysis 1 severely loses steam. The story and setting of Crysis 2 are unremarkable and feel very characteristic of the era, which was dominated by brown and grey shooters, but it was decent enough for me to finish. It's a perfectly average shooter.

The Hype for the game is completely justified, what an experience. The best part of the game is it's unforgiving at every moment but you're given the opportunity to read all the movesets and try to defeat the bosses. So everytime you die you not only die with frustration but also die knowing something new to deal with the boss and you really get the best kind of dopamine each time you defeat these bosses. You're also given the freedom to fight however the hell you want. Every main boss is uniquely designed with their own set of brutal but awesome move sets. The larger enemies are kind of tedious to fight, they look awesome, the setpieces are visually gorgeous but most of the time they're not as fun as the other enemies who are more challenging and at the same time more fun. Also I really wish the game had a feature where you could replay all these bosses without entering someone else's world. Story wise, I did feel disconnected throughout but I don't think it even matters all that much since it more than makes up for it with the gameplay. Another problem I had with the game is how locked away most of the main bosses are, the game really wants to explore every nook and cranny of its extremely vast open world but it's really hard to look for most of the bosses without an YouTube video guiding you. The exploration aspect is definitely cool but I find myself craving more to fight the bosses the game has to offer. Getting to Malenia was more frustrating than the boss fight itself. It's kinda understandable the developers design the game in a way to get the online community to interact and come up with all the solution to the most bizzare puzzles they've set, but personally I would have preferred it to be easily accessible. If this is the best game of FromSoftware when it comes to accessibility then I really don't know how I'd fair out in their other games. The game doesn't look next gen or anything but it's got one of the best art style you can ever find in a game. The music is equally spectacular.
The performance was stuttery and it would actually get worse if I lower the settings, the only work around with the performance is playing the game offline. Playing it offline kinda stabilised the performance. Also the final fight had one of the best bosses and at the same time one of the game's worst. I would have really enjoyed the final fight if Radagon had a second phase or something, elden beast was absolutely abhorrent of a boss, the most annoying part of the game for me. With all that said, we will be there no matter what for the DLC as well as NG+.

If this is how gorgeous the first game looks then idk how insane Forbidden West is gonna be on PC. A solid 3/5 game, took me some time to get used to the combat but it got more fun with time. Oh and the Shield-Weaver outfit carried my ass throughout the latter part of the game. Just walking through different locations from this game feels so relaxing and therapeutic, they really hit it out of the park when it comes to balancing fidelity and artstyle. There were some texture pop in issues especially on Meridian but you'd only see them if your playing for way too long without restarting the game. Really hope Forbidden West is properly optimised for PC 🤞🏼

It was good to see them not following the trend set by Combat Evolved of backtracking the same area multiple times. Also they really cooked with the cutscenes, the CGI/animation of the cutscenes definitely felt movie calibre. They could've actually made an animated series/movie out of those cutscenes instead of the live action Halo.The actual game looks good too but then doesn't really match the visual tone/quality set by the cutscenes, so it felt like watching 2 different things. The gameplay was really fun, had a lot of diverse setpieces/encounters but it did feel hard to navigate stuff on heroic difficulty, also frustrating at times with the poor checkpoint system and bullet sponginess. I can't really vouch for this being the best among the series, so far Reach and 3 are tied at that for me.