Crysis 2 Review

Multiplayer is an altogether more standard affair, with Crytek UK taking the reins to provide a set of foundations deeply recognisable to those familiar with Call of Duty. You've got your community features, such as clan tags and emblems, alongside the standard MMO-style breadcrumbs of levelling, challenges and weapon upgrades. There's also an auto-mute feature, which is wonderful.

The twist, of course, is that each player is strutting around in their very own Nanosuit complete with everything that entails, with traditional perks swapped out for shiny suit upgrades. Maps are based on the single-player campaign but are generally smaller and operate at a rhythm more attuned to constant combat, funnelling players into wide-open killzones and gleefully forcing confrontation seconds after each spawn.

Each of the game's 12 supplied maps feel dense and desperate, and you'll find yourself relying on the cloak for a temporary breather as much as you will for using it for surprise shotgun attacks. Alongside the staple inclusion of Team Deathmatch and FFA modes, Crytek UK puts a nice spin on regular team-based multiplayer tropes with Crash Site, Extraction and Assault.

Assault, for instance, strips a defending team of their Nanosuits but gives them heavy weapons to compensate, Extraction tasks one team with stealing a tank but buffs up players with improved abilities, and Crash Site makes both factions capture and hold Ceph pods periodically dropped into the map.

Whether it has enough mettle to compete in the long-term is another question - and one that will be tested over the coming months - but from this initial glance it certainly seems like there's enough in Crysis 2's multiplayer to at least tide people over until the autumn.

Crytek's fourth game is their most confident to date, carefully balancing silliness, seriousness, and spectacle, and despite looking like a laundry list of bad shooter clichés at first glance the end product is surprisingly fresh-faced and triumphant. Switching to New York gives Crytek what it desperately needed: a credible sense of menace to go alongside gorgeous technical fortitude and impressive artistic direction.