Thirteen Games To Blow Your Mind Off In 2011

CRYSIS 2 (XBOX 360, PS3, PC)

If there’s one thing that you can always be sure of when developers Crytek are concerned, it’s that when they develop a game, it will be a graphical beast. The original Far Cry, released back in 2003, remained a graphical benchmark for many, many years to come, and 2007’s Crysis was a game that even computers today find it hard to run on maximum settings. The sheer visual fidelity of Crytek’s games makes for some glorious looking games.

However, all that visual punch is also backed with a lot of substance. 2007’s Crysis, for instance, was an open world shooter with great physics and dynamics, and a neat new twist on the now well trodden story of an alien invasion of the earth. It certainly was one of the fresher shooters we’d played in years, and there’s a reason that Crysis is still talked about to this day, in an age when the forum life of a game, or the duration of its mindshare, is often less than a couple of months- it’s because the game was just that darned good.

Obviously, then, a sequel is something to look forward to, especially when the developers themselves have gone out on numerous occasions to state that this will be their biggest best game yet. However, then the bombshell is dropped that this game is being developed for the HD consoles and for the PC simultaneously, and there’s a collective groan from the fanbase- the HD consoles, which are considerably weaker than the PC, are sure to hold the game back, cripple it, keep it from reaching the same levels of greatness that the original game scaled.

A look at the reveal trailer for this game certainly serves to ease our fears somewhat. The game looks good, and the setting might make fr some interesting twists. And when you hear statements that the game is being polished to the maximum extreme (which accompanied the announcement of this game’s delay), you begin to heave a sigh of relief.

More gameplay demonstrations show us that the game looks as good as it ever did, although there are many who might groan at the game’s newer, grittier greyscale color scheme, which brings this game more in line with the shooters of today, like Gears and Killzone. However, by forsaking the much more colorful, and shall we say, vegetative graphics of the first game, Crysis 2 may have given up the one thing that really set it apart from the other games visually, the one thing  that was its visual identity.

Moreover, there’s the fact that Crysis, as fresh as it was in its 2007 form, is, with the sequel, beginning to look ordinary, unremarkable. it looks polished and exciting, to be sure, but exactly, from a purely gameplay standpoint, what is it about it that warrants hype?

Well, if developers Crytek are to be trusted, then this game will be something extraordinary. We’ll know for sure in a couple of months anyway. Till then, we can safely say that Crysis 2 deserves all the hype on the sheer basis of its pedigree and history.