Despite me grievences with how much the game has changed I still enjoyed it. Although I am no PC elitist and don't like to throw the "consolized" card around, I'm afraid I have to here based on the demo. The game has been "consolized" and it's a damn shame for people like me who played Crysis multiplayer since the beginning. In it's own right, Crysis 2 is good, but compared to it's predecessor...it's scaled back.
Cloak and speed have been nerfed big time:
Speed mode in the first game wasn't bound to your sprint, you had a SPRINT KEY for that. No Speed mode was it's own thing and when you turned that on you fucking flew, it really felt like you were speed hacking but it was never too fast. Now it's just your standard sprint function you find in any FPS...maybe a tad faster but still a shell of its former self. Speed was always one of those things you use to make a quick escape or clear open and vulnerable areas, not so much here.
Cloak mode drains too quickly compared to the first game, although I found this to have its pros and cons. In the first game, the drain was proportional to how much you moved, and while that still holds truing in Crysis 2 there are some noticeable differences. I don't mind it too much here because I can see why they nerfed it for balancing reasons. But why the hell does it drain so fucking fast when you are stationary? In the first game, you could sit still in cloak mode not moving for like a minute before needing to recharge...the hell is with the nerf? I would have gladly taken a quicker cloak drain for movement than have stationary drain be so damn fast.
Strength mode works generally the same as it did before, no big deal with any tweaks done to it.
Turning on armor mode is pretty odd at first, but again i can sorta see the balancing act they were trying to go with. Although it feels kind of inconsistent as sometime I take a hell of a beating and other times I drop in no time at all. Though that could just be players getting some good shots in, not a big deal to me though.
No more on the fly weapon customization is a bit of a shame, but it's not that big of a deal, more of a superficial thing. Picking your load out at the beginning of the game is fine by me.
I am very doubtful there will be any official maps that are huge and wide open like the first game. Although the PC version will have mods so this problem can be quickly solved along with player caps and hopefully vehicles as well. I wanna see some maps from the first game come back though, that would be great.
And yea there is something about the feel of it all that gives off that console vibe. Now like I said, I still had fun with the game, but it really doesn't stack up to the first game in terms of features which is a damn shame. The augments do somewhat offset this and so far they feel balanced as well as the kill streaks. They don't feel as unbalanced and broken as some of CoDs perks and kill streaks.
I really do like how kill streaks are done in this game though as you gotta go the extra step in order to get them. You can't just be a sniping ***** and rack up kills then call in the space laser or whatever. No, you gotta go over to your victims body and collect dog tags and the kill streak requires a certain amount of dog tags collected in order to execute it. And if you die but still managed to get that requirements for that kill streak before, then you retain it which is nice.
Really on the game play side of thing, I am torn. On one hand it's a stripped down version of its former self like I said. But held up by its own merits it is a fine and enjoyable game that may come a little close to call of duty but hell,it's Call of Duty with super powers...SUPER POWERS. So while I am disappointed that it's not what I expected, I had fun and I can respect it for what it is and will probably end up buying it if my next concern is alleviated.
The graphics options in the damn demo better be for the demo only and not be like that in the final game. Now I am no graphics whore, I loved Cryis for the damn gameplay with the visuals being the icing on the cake. But the demo left me worried by having really basic graphics options of: Resolution, vsync, fullscren/window, and graphics settings in its most besic; gamer? hardcore? the hell? I don't care how well optimized cryengine 3 is, I want to option to tweak AA, shadows, textures, the whole nine yards like I can in the first game and plenty of other PC games.
This better be for the demo because if this is how the full game is going to be I will be gravely disappointed that they strayed so far from the PC in order to bring this game to consoles. If that was the case they should have just kept the game on PC or consoles if they were just gonna pull this kind of stunt. It's even worse when they claimed that PC is still of their highest concern and they chuck us this demo that just sends off a lot of alarms.
*sigh* Well as you can see I'm rather conflicted on the whole thing and have this love-hate relationship right now with it as some other people may. That's just my 2 cents I guess, enough rambling from me.
