Dead Island Demo
Dead Island is a first person shooter game developed by Techland and published by Deep Silver. The game is scheduled for release in Q3, 2011 so there is still some time to the game release. The game is currently under development for PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 and once the development is over, developers will release free Dead Island demo version for all those platforms. This horror action-adventure game will be available in both single player and multiplayer modes however Dead Island demo is supposed to release in single player mode only. And not all the single player content would be available in the free demo game. It will give you an access to some limited single player gameplay only.
Like many other action-adventure horror games, it also focuses on zombie infected gameplay where the players role is to kill zombies using certain melee combat techniques. The plot is set in the Royal Palms Resort in fictional Banoi in Papa New Guinea. Player is busy in partying and zombie outbreak has taken place in the city. He awakens and decides to fight the zombies to save his city from danger. Many combat tools such as axes, and other customizable weaponry is available in the Dead Island demo version. The game supports four playable characters in the cooperative mode. All of them are placed in the Hero category and are immune to zombie infection.
Dead Island is powered by Chrome Engine v5. The game thus shows excellent graphics and artificial intelligence. There are many other features such as experience system, skill tree, stamina bar etc provided in the game. Critics and reviewers have stated the game to be one of the best zombie games till date. Dead Island demo is supposed to release soon. To know when the Dead Island demo version is releasing, just subscribe to our RSS feeds. We will then let you know how to download it on your Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 and will also provide direct link to download Dead Island PC demo.
[Source : Dead-Island.com]
Dead Island Music
Part of what made the cinematic trailer for Dead Island so effective was the brilliant, moving musical score that accompanied the visuals. Anyone who has seen the trailer can probably hum the song in their head. An often overlooked element to a game is the music that accompanies it, but when a development team gets it right (see: Alan Wake), the end results can help further the atmosphere of an already worthwhile game.
The developers at Techland are hoping to achieve that sense of atmosphere in next month’s Dead Island. Today, they have released three songs, in their entirety, to help set the mood for their open-world zombie title.
While the score for the cinematic trailer was composed by Giles Lamb, the game’s score is composed by Pawel Blaszczak, who previously composed the music for The Witcher, and all three games in the Call of Juarez series. Fans who may have been worried that the gameplay wouldn’t be as somber and serious as the initial trailer can take note in these songs. They illicit a sense of urgency, despair, and violence that should reflect the gameplay. Combining elements of multiple, varying genres including first-person, RPG, open-world, and co-op, Dead Island has set the bar high for itself.
Due to the demand for the full theme music for Dead Island’s trailer has been up for sale on iTunes.
The 3 minute long tune costs $0.99.
[Source: True Achievements]
Gamescom 2011: Big Challenges in Star Wars: The Old Republic
End game content shown off from BioWare’s upcoming MMO.
While EA and BioWare weren’t giving out a release date for The Old Republic at Gamescom 2011, they were showing off some of the high level content that’ll be included. As you might know at this point, The Old Republic is a traditionally-styled MMO set in the Star Wars universe that lets you play on the side of the Empire or the Republic. You’ll be able to engage in fully-voiced conversations with NPCs to take on quests and solo the content if you wish, quest as a group, or jump into some of the more specialized challenges designed to encourage teamwork.
These challenges include Flashpoints, basically dungeons, which are accessible while you’re leveling, PvP Warzones that challenge you to take down real players instead of computer-controlled enemies, as well as Operations, essentially BioWare’s version of raids.
For those who like PvP, it sounds like the Huttball Warzone may be fun to try. There’s a kind of game show aspect to this mode, as players from both Republic and Empire sides are mixed together to participate in a challenge that’s like if American football was mixed with an especially deadly version of American Gladiators. Because the teams are mixed it means Jedi can fight Jedi and Sith can fight Sith. The overall goal is to grab an energy ball near the center of a square map and run or pass it across a line along the outside, like scoring a touchdown in football. Of course when murderous psychopaths wielding light sabers are running around, it’s not quite as easy.
It’s possible to jar loose the ball from the carrier by attacking, but you’ll need to do so before the ball carrier passes to a teammate. There are also numerous environmental obstacles to avoid littered around the arena, including corrosive pools and flaming sections of elevated walkway. It contributes to making the mode seem like one of the least self-serious aspects of The Old Republic, which could serve as a nice change of pace if you’ve otherwise been busy hacking away at towering bosses in Operations.
BioWare showed off the Eternity Vault Operation, an underground network that houses a huge power both the Republic and Empire are interested in. Before reaching its front gate encircled by snowy terrain, you have to take a drop pod down from a ship circling overhead. There’s no loading screen to pass the time of the journey – you watch the drop pod streak through the sky and slam into the surface. Then as you approach the door the Vault, its defense whir into action.
Droids blanket the ground and do their best to wipe out your group. They’re aided by two tall turret towers on either side of the battle zone that can absorb a decent amount of damage before they’re disabled by your lighting attacks, light saber throws and blaster fire.
After a few waves of droid a colossal boss drops down into the arena that wiped the group demoing at Gamescom. This thing can sweep its arm across the screen and inflict significant knock back against any combatants in the vicinity, as well as launch variety of missile attacks. From time to time it’ll collapse into an inactive state, at which point it’s a good idea to go hit it with as many light sabers as you can. If that doesn’t kill it, it’ll return to shooting missiles. Thankfully it’s possible to take some cover by running behind the smoking debris the turret towers, but of course while you’re hiding you’re not doing any damage.
Considering the length of development time and what’s been shown off so far, it seems as though there will be no lack of content when Star Wars: The Old Republic launches. Hopefully a release date is announced soon.
[Source : IGN]
Old Republic To Be ‘Biggest Online Launch In History’
We still don’t know exactly when Star Wars: The Old Republic is coming, but BioWare has big plans for when it does.
Speaking with Gamasutra, project director James Ohlen confirmed that BioWare is expecting the game’s launch to be gigantic.
“Because of the hype around the game right now, our launch numbers are predicting something really huge,” Ohlen said, “which means we have to be ready for the biggest online launch in history essentially, which has made it really tough. We’ve been running a lot of tests, just making sure we’re going to stand up when we launch.”
Ohlen says the game is far into development, and the current build is stable.
“Most BioWare games that are new come together at the last like, four months or something like that. Usually they look like trainwrecks,” he said. “When we’re showing them to the producers or publishers, they’re like ‘oh my god, how is this game going to come together?’ And then it comes out, and it’s a 90 Metacritic game. But this game hasn’t been the same, it’s actually been in really good shape and playable for a long time.”
The game is constantly evolving as more feedback is considered, and Ohlen continues to make changes based on opinions he receives.
“I look at all the feedback that’s coming in. I play the game a lot now. So one of my jobs is to kind of sift through all the feedback I’m getting, both from the internal team and external sources, and figure out what to do with that,” he said. “So I like to make sure that I’m playing the game a ton so I’m not just taking someone’s word for it that a part of a game needs fixing.”
[Source: IGN]
No official release date for Diablo III yet
No, we don’t have the official release date for Diablo III. Nobody does. However, we can tell you how to apply for a chance to beta test the highly-anticipated video game.
First, you need an account at Battle.net. Once registration is complete, visit the Diablo III section and click on Beta Profile Setting. You must download and run the Beta Opt-in application. Under the section Beta Test I’m Interested In, select the Diablo universe. Now, wait anxiously by the computer screen for the next few weeks.
Blizzard Entertainment does not guarantee entry into the beta test to anyone, nor do they know how long the testing period will last.
The company did say that entry into test will be determined on how many players they need, the best variety of systems specifications and a little bit of luck.
Keep in mind, any progress players make during the test will not carry over to the full release. Because the game is available on both PCs and Macs, the beta test will also be available to Mac users.
Diablo III is an action role-playing game (RPG) that is the long-awaited third installment of the Diablo franchise. Players are immersed in a dark online fantasy world where they will embark on an epic quest. The game will have all of the elements of a typical RPG, such as picking up items and character classes. The last iteration of the game was released in June 2000.
As of now, there is no solid release date for the game.
[Source: CBS]
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review
OK, gamers, your enforced summer recess – the industry never releases anything major when half of the population has headed for sunnier climes – is about to end. This year, the resumption of normal service will be signalled by a particular event … the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
The third instalment of the much-loved but long-dormant action-RPG may lack any input from original creator Warren Spector, but it has benefited from all the resources that Eidos can throw at it, and the outcome is pretty spectacular.
As a franchise, Deus Ex’s overriding concern has always been to offer an antidote to single-path games, and to let you navigate it using your chosen play style, be it stealth, gun-toting brute force or strategic nous manifested in activities such as hacking. Previous iterations of Deus Ex – in common with pretty much all other games that set out to support multiple play-styles – never quite lived up to that ambition. But Deus Ex: Human Revolution does.
You play Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries, a Detroit-based company specialising in human augmentation and weapons design (the latter pays the bills for the former). After a military-style raid on the Sarif HQ results in the death of its top augmentation scientists (including Jensen’s ex), you embark on a quest to find those responsible, which naturally escalates into a twist-heavy uncovering of a monumental conspiracy.
Story-wise, Human Revolution is unimpeachable, impeccably exploring what would happen if, in the near-future (it is set in 2027), humankind became able to cyborgise itself. Visually, the game is fantastic, making heavy use of a futuristic palette of black, gold and orange married with environmental design reminiscent of Blade Runner – appropriately enough, as that film also explored the removal of boundaries between human and machine.
But it’s the gameplay that blows you away: it really does let you play however you prefer. There’s a great stealth engine, which lets you creep around, take down enemies and hide them, and get to otherwise inaccessible places by crawling around ventilation ducts. A rather excellent hacking mini-game lets you acquire control of turrets, cameras and security robots when you find security stations
Once Jensen has been suitably augmented, he can use psychology and charm to talk the info he seeks out of people – again, the game possesses a more logical and less hit-or-miss persuasion system than any previous games. And there’s a great first-person shooting engine, with a wide choice of weaponry and explosives that can be upgraded – although the AI is sufficiently unforgiving that, if you encounter a significant number of enemies, your chances of survival are minimal. And anyway, there are so many ways around each obstacle that the guns-blazing approach seems, frankly, a bit rude.
Jensen’s ability to add to his base level of augmentation is at the game’s core. You earn Praxis points with which to buy augmentations through hitting experience point milestones, or you can buy them from so-called LIMB clinics. The augmentation tree is a gamer’s dream, giving you access to a vast array of futuristic abilities – such as temporary invisibility, punching through walls, resistance to EMP blasts and electric shocks, the ability to fall from heights without sustaining damage and lots more.
It would be handy if you were given a bit more guidance as to what augmentations to buy, though, particularly in the build-up to the boss-battles. The boss-battles are the reason why Human Revolution hasn’t quite managed to achieve our ultimate five-star grade.
The later ones, especially, are fearsomely hard, which is fair enough, but they force you to take a single approach, which is completely anathema to everything the game stands for, and is particularly irritating once you get used to the freedom of approach which the rest of the game gives you.
That wouldn’t be an issue if you could even partially (and temporarily) rejig your augmentations. So, make sure you perform all the side-quests, in order to upgrade yourself to the max, and it’s a good idea to loot all the enemies you kill and look in every drawer for items like painkillers and credit chips.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution falls just short of perfection, then, but it is, nevertheless, an amazing game, which will confound those who persist in tarring games with the brush of mindlessness. The future it presents may be worryingly dystopian, but by God, it’s fun to explore on the safe environment of your console.
[Source: Guardian]
The Latest Battlefield 3 Is Finally Released
The brand new Battlefield 3 might be launched in the fall of 2011, and exactly what a game this is going to be, in case you got the chance to consider a glimpse at the trailers already available on the internet you’ll certainly agree with me that this is going to be a blockbuster in the gaming business.
Battlefield 3 is surely an action game based on a first-person shooter, produced by a company known as EA Digital Illusion and published by Electronic Arts, the game is designed for Xbox 360 console, Microsoft Windows and Ps3.
The primary features from this new Battlefield 3 are maximalist combined arms fights, which is what made the sequence so popular for single-players, multi-player and co-operatives mode. Several components will be reintroduced which were not section of the Bad Company games, which includes the vulnerable situation, fighter jets, and 64-player fights on PC, but the floor area will be limited to PS3 and Xbox 360 in order to allow for low player counts on console.
An exciting change on the contrary will probably be to the choppers and aircraft flying space, and the power which they must travel much further outside the map limitations.
A feature that will not show up in Battlefield 3, as opposed to Battlefield 2, is the commander mode, as stated by EA in a Question and Answer session on the Game-Informer magazine, a media that’s met with little understanding on the EA community forum by the many members who recognized this function.
The newest release of Battlefield 3 is based on a new type of character technology animation called ANT, which is a technology that was previously used primarily on Sports games like the FIFA game, however it’s now getting used in games such as Battlefield 3 to create a soldier that looks more realistic, and to produce player models that may appear more true in their moves, actually soldier may seem like they have the capability to move into cover and turn their heads just before they change themselves, this brand new technology will offer the player a new kind of experience never seen before.
This latest launch of Battlefield 3 is an awesome pleasure for everyone passionate Battlefield players, because we have been waiting eagerly for this new release since 2008, and of course we expect allot from it, in fact the market need and pre-orders numbers speak for their selves.
The Sims 3 Ambitions Gameplay Summary
The Sims 3 Ambitions expansion brings some great new features to the game. This article will cover the new skills, professions, and rewards that you’ll find in the game. Ambitions produces a huge variety of different means of earning money. This will help you to milk even more fun out of the game.
Professions are the primary feature of Ambitions. A profession is very different from a career. Pursuing one of these, you’ll choose when and where your Sim works. You can take on a variety of different jobs for each profession, which will earn your Sim money. Professionals also earn a weekly stipend, which never gets better past level 10. The only way to improve your pay aside from volume work is to take the new Profession Simoleon Booster reward, which can net you some great cash.
There are six professions total to be explored. You can join one of these by using the computer, or going to one of the businesses in town. The five new professions are: fire fighter, stylist, architect, ghost hunter, private investigator. The sixth is merely an upgrade to an existing one, doctor. As you climb the medical career track you will be called to leave work and do special jobs. This is the least interesting of the new additions.
Firefighters will get sent out on rescue missions and must put out fires in the homes of other Sims. Stylists will get special jobs to make over another Sim after finding out what the Sim wants to improve. This is similar to the architect, who will get jobs like, “spend X money upgrading the bedroom”. You can talk to the other Sim and find out what they want, then head to a special sort of build mode to edit the lot. Make sure everything’s accessible and that you’re spot on with the budget.
Ghost Hunters can head out into the world and remove hauntings from Sim homes, and even use a special spirit detector to collect ghosts. Ghosts range in value and may provide over a thousand bucks when sold. The Private Investigator profession features plenty of that Sims humour. You’ll go on silly cases and ultimately follow the clues to the end. There are dozens of different cases to pursue.
As if all the new professions to explore are not enough, there are also the sculpting and inventing skills. Sculptors can make great decor for the home out of a variety of materials, from wood to metal. The assortment of different things to build is huge, although many of these are simply recoloured models from the game. It’s still a great skill to use, and fun to advance. No one will have the same sculptures, so it’s neat to see the different things that can be made.
Inventing is likewise great. You can make a variety of toys and gizmos that are merely for sale, but other things that actually provide utility can be constructed with patience. You can make a floor item that gives Sims a random positive mood let when they walk over it, and even make a gizmo that sucks up all the vegetables in a large garden area. Sims who master the skill can make their very own Simbot, a member of the household that eats metal and can pursue most any lifestyle.
There are new lots with Ambitions, as well. You can now head to the junkyard to get metal to be used in inventing or sculpting. You’ll find perfectly good items there which can be fixed up, too. It pays to check the junk yard once in a while for treasures. Another new lot is the consignment store. This allows Sims who are self employed to make extra cash on their items. Sell your paintings, sculptures, inventions, whatever, at the store, and you’ll eventually get better thanks to this experience and earn even bigger payouts.
Ambitions make some wonderful additions to The Sims 3. There is much more to this expansion, and little nuances that will change the way Sims interact, and home decor. While professions do get stale after a while, the new skills are an excellent contribution. Most players would agree that this expansion outdid World Adventures for providing so many different new things to do in town. World Adventures content wasn’t even visible if you weren’t travelling. I highly recommend Ambitions.
[Source: Ezine Articles]
The Elder Scrolls 5 Upcoming Game Release Is Anticipated To Be A Hit
The Elder Scrolls v is the most anticipated fantasy roleplaying game for 2011 for a reason. The new game engine will breathe life into the world of Skyrim with a realism never seen before in the earlier chapters of the Elder Scrolls series. In the fantasy land of Skyrim, you will venture forests and mountain ranges, fight dragons and discover treasures, and gain your skills with everyday routines like farming and mining.
Elder Scrolls Skyrim is the next creation in the award-winning Elder Scrolls series. Its the follow up to the 2006 Game of the Year, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the next anticipated game from Bethesda Game Studios.
Elder Scrolls Skyrim begins with the player character as a prisoner in a nort of Tamriel, the place on which all the previous games in the series have taken place. Skyrim is set few hundred years after the events of Oblivion, in the land of Skyrim. The country has exploded into a civil war after the killing of its King. The god Alduin takes the form of a huge dragon and sets to destroy the world. The player is the last Dovahkiin alive, and must save the world of Skyrim from its destruction…
Elder Scrolls Skyrim has the traditional open world gameplay found in the Elder Scrolls series. There are five cities within Skyrim, with expanses of wilderness and mountains. Within the cities you can complete activities like mining, cooking and farming and you can level up by rising your eighteen skills. You can create weapons and they are assigned to each hand individually. There are different type of Spells which can be used from a range and close combat. “Fire spells” burn and cause damage, while “Cold spells” slow down your enemies and takes their stamina.
Elder Scrolls V, will be based on a brand new game engine. It has improved significantly from the earlier one, bringing more reality to the game. A lot has changed in the character personalities and in their behaviour that makes sense in the context of the world. In Skyrim, people will have their routines, and tasks that they fill their days with. Non Player Characters (NPCs) will react to you in a very realistic way, and they can get more hostile or friendly, depending how you behave on them. So your relationships with the NPCs has a lot to do with how they behave on you, just like in a real life.
With the new game engine, the lighting is more dynamic and close-up details are increased to make the world of Skyrim more beliveable. The trees shake violently in stormy weather and all the smallest details have been taken in notice.
All in all, the new engine will improve many things for Elder Scrolls Skyrim, making it a very realistic adventure.
Elder Scrolls 5 release date is set on 11.11.2011
Crysis 2 Preview
Crysis 2 bears the weight of heavy expectations on its shoulders. PC gamers want a new system-crushing game to show off their hardware, and console players were promised the “best-looking game ever.” In the wake of Modern Warfare’s ascension, Crysis fans worried that the series’ expansion to consoles would lead to a narrow, dumbed-down experience.
Thankfully, Crysis 2 sidesteps the excessive simplification of recent shooters with Nanosuited grace. It mixes destruction with beauty, and manages to deliver a more focused experience than its predecessor while retaining the building blocks of what made the original Crysis unique. Crysis 2 is the kind of game that speaks in superlatives — and even when it stumbles, it’s quick to recover, always pushing forward to another amazing moment.
Set in a 2024 that seems more like the day after tomorrow, Crysis 2 depicts New York City, under assault from all directions. A bizarre virus is devouring entire boroughs; the city is under uneasy martial law, brought about by a strained partnership between the military and private security conglomerate Crynet. Then the alien invasion begins, and things fall apart. As a marine named Alcatraz (Callsign? Codename? Rude parents? Crysis 2 never says), you arrive amidst devastation and chaos, sporting Crysis’ trademark Nanosuit — a semi-living suit of combat armor with advanced AI.
The Nanosuit is the lens through which you view Crysis 2, and it adds a great sense of cohesiveness to the game. Once you hit the Start button, everything you see and do — save for load screens — occurs in first-person view. Instead of wading through weapon- and power-selection menus, you’re presented with in medias res overlays and subtle visual effects, which indicate the Nanosuit’s status. The Nanosuit has three modes: Stealth imparts near-invisibility; strength grants more powerful melee attacks, greatly increased movement speed, and jump height; and armor makes you something of a walking tank. Each power drains your suit’s energy to varying degrees — and Crysis 2′s foundation lies in juggling these powers, finding new ways to combine them, and using them in unexpected ways.
It’s great, then, that Crytek presents such a varied playground in its torn and broken New York City. Crysis 2 shines most when you push the Nanosuit to the limits of what you think it can do, and the best moments come from points where you stop and ask “did I really just pull that off?” Crysis 2 is a collection of sandboxes, some enormous in size, all laid out to provide multiple options for tackling your objectives. Your suit’s AI identifies strategic points of interest if you choose, allowing you to mark tactical points or elements, like weapon caches and enemy locations. After that, it’s up to you: Will you crank up your armor, tear a mounted machine gun off its hinges, and walk through the front door? Or will you sneak in to flank an enemy position, silently murdering foe after foe?
Crysis 2′s enemy AI is smart, yet believable. Sure, you can set enemies up for ambushes, but carelessness often provokes massive coordinated responses that require quick thinking to deal with. Combat usually spirals out from the initial encounter randomly, and most fights unfold differently each time you play them. Thank Crysis 2′s environments, which aren’t just wide, but also tall — you can always find a way up and over, a way to come crashing down. When you fight Crynet’s paramilitary forces, the ability to strike from on high and disorient your opponents is empowering and predatory. During encounters with the alien Ceph, the balance shifts; your attention isn’t just on where you can go, it’s where your more mobile foes can cut you off and ambush you. While you’re the cliched one-man army, the tools at your disposal are primed to enable clever play more than brute force. The free-wheeling weapon customization from the original Crysis has returned, which allowed you to modify weapons with scopes, silencers, undercarriage attachments and such, and it’s been joined by Nanosuit upgrades. The suit upgrade menu is actually your hand – twitching each finger selects a different subset of upgrades, and only one of each subset can be active at once.
This adds to Crysis 2′s replayability, since the abilities you earn and the weapon modifications you find are available in all previously completed chapters, on any difficulty level. It’s a sort of new game plus situation, without explicitly naming it as such. This makes up for Crysis 2′s smaller playground.
You won’t find quite as much space for random wandering this time out. New York isn’t Lingshan Island, and the sense of urgency and forward momentum is that much greater in Crysis 2. But that shift leads to a game that feels more focused than the original, while avoiding some of Crysis: Warhead’s more bizarrely funneled sections. Crysis 2′s occasional narrow, tunneled areas are almost never combat scenarios; instead, they feel like deliberate moments of respite, to let you take in the catastrophe around you, and to build on the story.
Written by sci-fi novelist Richard K. Morgan (of Altered Carbon and Black Man/Thirteen), Crysis 2′s story deals with sophisticated themes like transhumanism and the corporatization of power. The story is slow to get going, and once it does, it sometimes seems like some pretty important moments of exposition got cut. Plot holes notwithstanding, Crysis 2 tells an interesting (if uneven) story that doesn’t talk down to you. You just need to pay attention (and discover at least a few of the hidden e-mail collectibles) to be clear on what’s going on.
You may have trouble paying attention to the story, though, given Crysis 2′s constant sensory assault. This is the best-looking console game to date. It eschews the dark, hyper-filtered visual style of games like Killzone and Gears of War for beautiful, ubiquitous light. Light isn’t directed in Crysis 2, it cascades — over buildings, through trees and glass, reflecting and bouncing around levels in a way you haven’t seen in a game before. It’s a stark contrast to the constant, screen-shaking destruction of one of the world’s most distinctive centers of popular culture. It’s difficult not to get caught up watching the FDR Drive ripple and fall to pieces in a roar of shifting concrete and a cloud of debris, or making your way past other shattered landmarks. The soundtrack complements this well, and Crysis 2 features loud, clear, aggressive positional audio for those with 5.1 setups. Gunfire echoes down city streets like Michael Mann directed them.
PC players in particular are in for a treat – Crysis 2 is easily in the running for best looking game on the platform. This isn’t a big surprise, given Crysis’s history. However, that the game runs so well across such a wide variety of systems shocked me. Expect greatly improved performance on the same hardware in comparison to Crysis and Crysis: Warhead. In this case, PC players benefit from Crysis 2′s journey to consoles.
So, where does Crysis 2 stumble? It has a checkpoint system that ranges from passable to unforgiving, as if it was designed to supplement the habitual PC quick-saving of the first game. Of course, there’s no quick-saving, even in the PC version of the game. Moreover, the free-thinking strategy that Crysis 2 fosters gets discarded completely at a few points, and the game demands a course of action without properly explaining what it is — or where to go. This can result in rare moments of exasperation or outright confusion. Then there are the glitches.
Crysis 2 on PC doesn’t suffer from the same number of AI glitches that its console cousins do, but there are still moments of bizarre behavior. Enemies will walk in circles, or headfirst into their teammates without end. Other times, enemies human and otherwise will remain completely oblivious to the shrieking firefight inches away from them. It’s… distracting. Crysis 2′s experience is often such a well integrated whole that watching the game’s facade fall for a moment hurts when it happens. Crytek are lucky that the game picks itself back up again so well that these are minor complaints.
For those looking beyond the campaign, Crysis 2 offers the de riguer persistent multiplayer experience. Much like Call of Duty, you can unlock an ever escalating series of weapons and suit upgrades (think: perks). While Crysis 2′s progression resembles Black Ops and its forbears, its moment to moment play remains purely Crysis. Every player has access to the standard Nanosuit abilities, and the superhuman showdowns can be unpredictable fun.
At first, anyway. After several months of beta play on Xbox 360 and PC (and about four hours of play with the review build), I can safely say that it has some balance issues. Sniper fire, cloaks, and Nanovision rule the field, and cut down on the Nanosuit physicality and traversal that make Crysis 2 feel different from other online shooters. It’s difficult to say whether a strong, long-term community will rally around the game.
Closing Comments
Despite those complaints, Crysis 2 succeeds. It’s a beautiful, engrossing experience that avoids the anemic, scripted playbook made law by the 500 pound shooter gorilla. It plays well, encourages creative problem-solving, and confidently delivers a series of escalating and changing encounters and scenarios that will push you to think in a way few shooters have in an era of increasingly funneled experiences. While Crysis 2 loses its footing during a few odd moments, Crytek more than delivers on the promise of their previous games.
[Source: IGN]