A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME

Crysis 2 is perhaps the most intense action-based first person shooter I’ve played in a long, long time. The hit and run tactics the game basically begs, pleads and bribes you to employ are simply exhilarating to the point where long play sessions become a mentally straining experience. Enabling cloak, screwing in a silencer to my assault rifle and popping a dude in the head from behind a carefully placed piece of cover makes me feel like a real guerrilla, a real bad dude, a real super soldier on the run.  An apt feeling given the game’s premise. But it also makes you feel smart, in an accomplished just worked out the solution to a maths problem you’ve been working on for the last hour kind of way.

In fact it does both so well that I couldn’t help but feel that with a few more ‘augmentations’ it could start to feel a bit more like a Deus Ex game, if Deus Ex had a partial lobotomy and suddenly grew some rather large testicles as a side effect of one of those new fandangled human enhancements.

That’s not to say that Crysis 2 is cerebrally challenged, nor that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is so smart that it’s boring. In fact I think that both are outstanding examples of their genre(s). But it makes me think that a game that treads firmly in both territories and pitches itself as both cerebral and balls-to-the-wall crazy is not a difficult proposition to imagine. In fact it really is the next logical step for first person shooters.