In my “early years” I was into the whole PC gaming malarkey, it offered something different to consoles, mainly clicking. Click, click, shitting click. You’d go out and buy a N64 or Playstation game, go home and immediately play it. If you were to go out and buy a PC game, you’d go home and spend half a day installing the game, find out you can’t run it, and wait two years until you can afford an upgrade. Two years later a sequel for that game is released and the cycle repeats.
This offers an unrivalled level of anticipation, but it also costs a hell of a lot money. I gave up long before Crysis came out. Crysis was infamous for its system requirements, roughly seven people in the world were able to play it. So it was strange not only that its sequel (aptly named Crysis 2) was released on consoles, but I also bought it.
It’s a first person shooter, and having played it for a few hours, that’s really the only way I can describe it because I haven’t got a fucking clue to what else is going on. Now the developer must know that no one could play it because there’s an achievement which references the very fact, so why did they make the story so impossible to follow. It’s like watching Manga backwards on mute with your eyes closed.
The story starts straightforward enough, you’re a marine, in a submarine. Then it gets complicated. You find out that you’re called Alcatraz, why have I got the same name as a famous prison? I’m already confused, then the submarine blows up! I’m in the Hudson river, there’s some sort of aircraft shooting lasers and scene. I wake up and I’m told I’ve been put in a nanosuit by a man who is dead. Before I can ask what a nanosuit is I’m being told by this dead man to run about and shoot some people. I don’t even know who these dudes are, but they’re shooting at me so I’m all too happy to oblige. Then the dead man stops talking to me and this other guy starts giving me instructions, and out of nowhere aliens appear and start attacking me. I had a 3D puzzle of the Millennium Falcon which was less confusing than this (note to self: must see if I still have this).
Nanosuit. Nano as in extremely small, suit as in a gentleman’s garment. So it’s a very tiny suit then? No, because playing as a microscopic man shooting the shit out of bacteria would be far too cool. Instead nanosuit just means a really cool suit which does some really cool shit. It’s all too easy to explain something technical by using the word nano, and in this case it’s just a bit like the hit TV show Jake 2.0 (remember that?).
As I’m shouting at the TV “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!” I’m wondering why Alcatraz isn’t shouting the same thing. He’s just doing what the strangers are telling him, unfazed that he has a magical suit on, and there’s aliens running about. Maybe he knows something that I don’t, maybe he played the first game, if he has a nanosuit he probably has quite a good PC.
I’m still only a few hours in so maybe the plot will unfold and eventually make sense like Akira did after the third viewing. If I miss anything it’s not a game I want to play twice because despite the critical acclaim it’s not very fun. Sure it’s pretty and you can go invisible and that, but it all feels a little sterile. Without a comprehensible plot it all seems pointless, maybe those who understand what’s going on love the game, but for me it’s a bit too much like Halo in the sense that I’m only playing it because everyone else says it’s good.
All good FPS’s must have a good multiplayer, and 9 ranks in and I’m almost not bored yet. It has copied elements from COD but has made a few inspired changes. What makes it different is the nanosuits, it requires a different style of play which encourages players to avoid the dreaded art of camping. Not that it’ll stop nerdy morons developing their own styles to make it as fun as putting your dick in a toaster, which I sometimes do after playing COD.
Like almost every other FPS this is another example of how not to write a story, it’s over complicated and boring, and meandering through the pretty streets of New York might be a bit more impressive if I knew why I was doing it. I may never know though because if I trade it in with five English pounds on Friday, I can have the new Tiger Woods game, and you can’t argue with sex and golf.
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