gunsmoke on 11/6/2010 at 16:13

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Hell, even Return to Castle Wolfenstein had it. All of the Rainbow Six 3 games, including Crit. hour and Lockdown. All the Ghost Recon Games. Shadow ops: Red Mercury. Thief: Deadly Shadows America's Army: Rise of a Soldier, Close Combat First to Fight...

Can I stop now? I am tired of reading my game manuals just to prove a point.

This are ONLY Xbox 1 games. By the way... and all I cared to check in my collection. That's quite a lot for 5 minutes of fact-checking, and no doubt FAR from an exhaustive list of Xbox 1 games, let alone the several other game systems with FPS titles.

Koki on 17/8/2010 at 17:49

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(http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-10-crysis-2/702900)

Quite uninteresting dev walkthrough of some level.

ANTSHODAN on 22/10/2010 at 23:26

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ahem...

um, that lucky winner person would be me - i hope no one else wanted it too badly :rolleyes: trust me i'm grateful to have it!

Anyways, I shall be sure to let you folks all know what I think of it, and maybe even post some shitty quality video footage unless I can somehow fiddle around with the video hard drive thinger for direct input. Either way... yay! :D

ANTSHODAN on 23/10/2010 at 03:08

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well Fafhrd pretty much covered it, but I'll try to write a bit about it myself...

Firstly, if you've played Modern Warfare multiplayer, you'll feel right at home. From the different classes that are ultimately only really seperated by their weapon loadout, to the killcam after you've been splattered over the wall, the influence is clear. That's not to say it is a bad thing. I've had some of my best multiplayer games on CoD 4! Crysis 2 shakes things up a bit, as you'll guess, with the nano suit. As Fafhrd pointed out, RB and LB correspond to Stealth and Armour respectively. A quick tap of stealth and your running speed is slowed, the sound becomes a bit more distant, somewhat cut off, and if you're familiar with Crysis, your weapon dissolves in a mess of blue future technology nonsense. While cloaked, you can't shoot until you've either switched to armour or uncloaked - and shooting while cloaking causes a small but significant lag between pulling the trigger and actually being able to shoot. Armour does just what you'd think too (or rather, I used to it so rarely, I guess it does). These two elements are governed by an energy bar which depletes as you use each power, so most of the time you'll be running around in neutral mode, switching to stealth and armour in the right situation.


The 'free running' elements work surprisingly well. It takes a bit of getting used to, but your character will automatically grab on to ledges and pull himself up (thankfully in a quick snappy movement complete with Mirror's Edge style animation). Once you've got the hang of this and begin to work out your limits, you're flying between different elevated points easily, and it can make for some quite dramatic escapes, or infiltrations. However in order to make this feature usable it is quite obvious that some control has been taken away from the player. Your character can jump pretty high, but once in the air, movement is severely restricted, so you need to get a good trajectory to begin with. Realistic, but frustrating. The aforementioned 'taking control away' comes from your boy grabbing ledges you don't want him to, being unable to grab onto other ledges that you damn well need to etc. All in all though, this mechanic works exceedingly well. Despite the niggles, it becomes very natural to be fluidly running over walls, up ledges and across gaps. Perhaps even more surprising is that (in my oh so humble opinion) it has done this without the cartoon physics feel that Halo had from similar high jumping freaks.

The class system is pretty flawed and definitely needs work. Like I said, it suffers from this Call of Duty syndrome, a game in which I personally felt each class was mostly indistinguishable apart from their weapon loadouts. "But Antshodan", I hear you cry out, "Call of Duty had the perks system which completely changed how you could play the character". Well yes you optimistic puppy, it did indeed, and the small changes in that perhaps made the difference between classes more pronounced. Crysis 2 has a similar system of perks which it calls perksmodules. These range from silent running, to stealth perception, from proximity alarms to epic melee fist slam ability. However I'm guessing that mostly you'll pick a class based on what his weapon is like.

Speaking of weapons, they are a mixed bag. Your assault class has your standard assault rifle, pistol and grenades, Scout class has your standard shotgun, pistol and grenades, Sniper class has your standard sniper rifle, pistol and grenades... are you seeing a pattern here. While the weapons ARE quite different in their usage (and I'm perhaps contradicting myself here, but editing is for pussies), but give an assault rifle to a Scout, and the only difference is whether or not he can walk quietly. Whether or not you CAN give an assault rifle to a scout is ambiguious. Certainly there were menus existing that looked an awful lot like CoD weapon loadout screens, but at the moment there was no way of properly editing weapons and perksmodules for the set classes. There IS however, a locked 'custom' class. Ba-boom, mystery solved. :erm: Anyway, I found the weapons to, on the whole, feel quite satisfying. A well timed shotgun blast to an enemy's head sends him to the ground like a sack of potatoes, and the sniper rifle might as well be firing packets of ketchup from the amount of blood it sends flying out of your target. The exception to this is some kind of 'electric rifle'. It's hard to pin down why it feels so shit, perhaps because BANG BANG has been replaced by a rather sedate bzzt. The weapons also need balancing. Perhaps it is my particular playing style, but I seemed to score a hell of a lot more kills with the shotgun and bzzt rifle than with the assault rifle. That said, I'm shit at headshots on console FPS games, and they really do count in Crysis 2.

Okay, I'm losing my train of thought - I'll move onto the map. I personally thought the map design was inspired. It felt real, it looked great, it was designed definitely with Crysis 2 gameplay in mind. There are choke points, strongholds, open areas, closed areas, opportunties for epic jumps and opportunities for insta-kill falls (not the newbie's friend). One problem was that it often seemed quite frantic. I was rather hoping for a more sedate affair, and at times I was indeed able to hide in a corner with a sniper rifle - but for the most part on a full server (I think it was 10 or 12 people, I honestly didn't count) you're likely to almost always have someone wanting to kill you.

The game modes in the Beta were team deathmatch and a capture control point affair, in which an Alien pod is dropped somewhere on the map (in one of several set locations of course), your team must hang around this pod accumulating points until it 'goes critical' and explodes. After which another pod gets dropped somewhere else on the map and the same thing happens. This makes for excellent gameplay. Coupled with the map's clever design, each 'control point' requires a reasonable bit of teamwork to cover every possible infiltration point, so there was some good communication about who would watch the door, the window, the big gaping hole in the side of the building. With the right people, I can see this mode becoming a lot of fun. Team Deathmatch was what you'd expect from team deathmatch (or what I've always seen Team Deathmatch as); that is deathmatch in which 40-50% of players won't try to kill you, or earn you points if you try to kill them. It was pretty much an each man for himself affair, with occasional instances of one team holding a well fortified position while the other team ran at them like ants into a moving train, getting squashed to pieces, until they had the common sense to launch a co-ordinated assault. Like I say, this was rare, depends who you are playing with.

Errrm, what else? I won't go on about graphics too much. It's very pretty, not as pretty as I had hoped, but it is on 5 year old hardware so I expect the PC version will have far more juicy graphical goodness. There are a couple of sound bugs, a couple of animation issues (particularly when you see another player vaulting up a ledge - it just looks, well, like there's some frames missing). I'm sure these will be ironed out in the final release.

The control system, as Fafhrd said, by the way, is indeed quite shit. I used grenades twice the entire time, and actually had to make a conscious effort to do so. Not only are they assigned to the D-Pad, but you have to 'equip' them first (think back to Half Life etc). To be honest, I'm so used to the mechanic of having a button throw a grenade, it feels awful going back to having to lose the use of your weapon while you fumble about with your explody-bulb. Can't even remember what D-Pad up and down did... D-Pad right turns on thermal vision. This is a pretty useful tool if you get used to it. You can see cloaked enemies and get the drop on them (they can't shoot you while cloaked), and to a certain extent you can see through walls. The map is littered with hot objects though; Air conditioners, hot pipes, etc, so it really has to be used strategically.

Hokay, i THINK that is it. Looks good, plays good, a bit of innovation, a bit of plagerism, good guns, bad guns, range of perksmodules, blah blah. Anything else, ask away! :thumb:

*preview post* holy shit, I think thats a personal best

fetgalningen on 24/10/2010 at 15:08

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SS2