I am very disappointed with Crysis 2.
1. Bad acting. I've expanded my list of CELL Operators. In order of appearance: 19 Year Old Kid Named Skip, Gay Black Man, Stormy from Sealab, and Guy Who's Trying His Best but It's Too Little Too Late.
2. Bad graphics. I know, I know, this is Dorf Forts, but dammit this is not what I've come to expect from Crytek. Crysis's graphics were amazing, they blew my mind. I looked down at my guy's arm and was like "What the fuck how many polygons is that, do numbers even go that high?" I looked down at my guy's arm in this and I was like "Shit, is this 2007?" I didn't buy and then assemble a high-end gaming computer to be forcibly held at the level of Jake "Dudebro" Sawyer's 6 year old XBox. The particle effects are also shit, and look like something you'd see in Doom 3.
3. Color. Crysis had crazy-ass colors, man. The trees were so damn green, the sky was so damn blue, the Secret Alien Base was so damn I don't even know, the snow was so snowy. Now we've got a palette of gray, brown, and blood (More on blood later).
4. Consolitis. I'm normally the last person to bitch and moan about "the console kiddies" but it's pretty egregious. There are no graphics options aside from "Gamer," "Advanced," and "Hardcore." That is fucking unacceptable. I'm an adult, I can set my own graphics settings. The mouse movement is sluggish, the levels are very linear, compared to Crysis which was so open-ended level-wise that you could often get away with just going around some bases. The first Crysis wasn't even released for consoles, this one was obviously developed for them despite the blatant lie that it was developed PC-first.
5. AI. The AI is terrible. Shoot a guy in the head. Everyone sort of panics, but not really, except for Guy #4. Bless his heart, Guy #4 really does try to panic. Cloak and disappear. Skip looks around and says "Eh, false alarm." Another time Guy #4 was all "I know we're not alone out here, I can
feel it." Really, what the fuck tipped you off man? Was it the dead bodies that keep turning up every few seconds or the gunfire? The problem is they have no high alert mode. They're either in combat or waiting for you to show up. They don't try to find you, they don't freak out when you kill a guy and then vanish, nothing. Sniper Ghost Warrior had better AI than this, and that's the only thing Sniper Ghost Warrior had better than anything.
6. The blood. So much blood. We're talking anime levels of blood here. I shot a guy with an HMG and all of his blood flew out. All of it. This wouldn't be a problem, I love me some blood, but it's shitty blood. It's using those terrible particle effects I mentioned before, and it doesn't actually splatter, it just flies out and conveniently disappears before it hits anything.
7. Before you think I hate it, I don't. I'm actually having fun. I'm just not having nearly as much fun as I should be. The aliens are pretty cool and some of the set-piece effects like the dropship flying through a building or the bridge collapsing are pretty cool, but they'd be cooler if I were actually pushing the graphics to the limit my computer can handle instead of pushing them to the limit Mr. Sawyer's XBox can handle.
Overall, Crysis 2 is trying desperately to appeal to the Call of Duty generation, but it doesn't matter because the Call of Duty kids think Crysis is "unrealistic" (They say this with no sense of irony), and they're too busy playing Black Ops and referring to marijuana as "weed" to notice Crysis 2 over here bending over backwards for them.
Oh well.
They made up for a bit of the problems by lampshading the magic infinite regenerating health thing games do nowadays. When you reach the deep-scan cradle it's discovered that pretty much every bone and organ in your body has been mangled beyond repair and the only reason you're still alive is the nanosuit.