Crysis 2

Engine Room: The hardware crusher Crysis returns, and this time it’s scalable.

How does your PC stand up to Crysis? Hopefully by now it's doing alright, but when it first hit our hardware back in 2007 this was a fascinating question. Three years later, Crysis 2 is closing in on your hardware once again, with an updated engine to give our latest CPUs and graphics cards something other than prime number searches to get their exercise.

This ain't no tech demo
For those who love to crunch the numbers, it's easy to let the engine overshadow the game itself. And Crysis 2 is no simple sequel. Crytek is taking Nomad out of the Pacific jungle of the original and dropping our hero into the thick of the toughest 'jungle' of all, New York City (oh yes, the marketing synergies of such a metaphor will be unstoppable). Especially tough when the rat race has been replaced by an urban war zone.

But then again, New York is well trodden turf in games and at the cinema. What's Crytek's special angle?

"I think we are depicting New York in our own 'Crysis Urban Jungle' style, with a clear visual signature," says Nathan Camarillo, Executive Producer on Crysis 2. "The portrayals of New York in movies like 'I Am Legend' and 'The Day After Tomorrow' were both very unique to them, so they each now 'own' a version of the city. With Crysis 2, we've set out to do much the same thing."

"You'll see all our concepts working in harmony: together with the Nanosuit you'll wear and the unique enemies you'll fight; you can also expect some shocking surprises in our take on New York City," says Camarillo. "Crysis 1 was set on a realistic island, but we changed that setting in ways the player did not expect through dramatic moments and alterations to the jungle environment. You can certainly expect transformations of larger magnitude in Crysis 2, giving you a New York City experience like no other in either games or cinema."

The new setting also brings with it a lot more opportunities in gameplay than we experienced in the original Crysis. One big factor Camarillo was eager to talk about is the addition of vertical gameplay. Given the power of the Nanosuit, you'll be jumping between the floors of buildings, jumping onto buses, trucks, down into craters, as well as from one building to another.

"The player is much more mobile in a real city playground and can change his position more often."

Some elements of the new CryENGINE3 will also look even better given the new setting.

"One great example for sure is our new rendering technique, Deferred Lighting," says Camarillo. "It allows for a huge number of dynamic lights in a scene, without requiring a high amount of processing power. And this is of course pretty much ideal for the New York setting."

Look out! Aliens!
For those disappointed by the aliens in Crysis 1, Crytek wants you to know they feel your pain.

"The aliens were interesting and interesting to fight in some cases but overall that weren't very challenging and they kind of broke the convention of gameplay you'd been learning over the course of the game," says Camarillo. "So in Crysis 2 we changed our aliens. They're still related, fictionally, but we've changed our aliens to be bipedal aliens. They're much larger than human and pretty intimidating. They use the human AI as the basis for their technology, but they're more mobile, more agile, they get around in the urban environment in a much more dynamic way than humans can. Humans are pretty ground constrained, so they can clamber up on things. But our aliens jump up on things, jump off of things, so it really gives you a better feeling of being in a 3D environment and having 3D combat without having things flying around you. We're really turning up the focus on alien combat."