Finished the game today.
In fact if one liked the first game, he may like the crysis 2 as well, since gameplay is exactly the same. there are differences in the powers of the suit, but more related to controls.
It is more acessible, obviously because of consoles, but it reminded me how they modified the jedi powers in jedi knight 2 compared to jedi knight 1. I remeber you have to select force jump in JK1 and press the "use force" key, while in JK2 you would automaticaly jump higher if you hold the jump button. That's how i felt playing crysis 2. Of course, I missed the "power" mode as an active power. They could maintain the passive, but maintain a possibility of activating it.
But now you can grab an enemy and toss him upwards just by holding mouse button 1, instead of changing the powers with mouse wheel. Stealth/cloak work the sameway as in the first. Even AI behave the same way, and since it's the way I play the most...
I hated the fact that using laser sight you can't use ironsight like in the first one. Oh, and there are some QTE, though they're so minimal and appear only in cutscenes, and the game waits a lot of time for you to press the keys, and I even doubt they were really timed.
Graphics-wise, I used maximum settings with that unofficial utility (set FOV to 75, since original game was too zoomed in)), and in fact it looked quite good. the disappointment is that it's a time where the engine gets an update that makes it look the same way it looked before, but with details that looked worse that the first one. Years ago, a new engine would be liht years ahead of it's predecessor, now, they look the same.
The details that were most noticeable are the water, witch has almost the same textures as the first game, but had no realtime reflection of gameworld objects. And pudles' reflexes were just a picture of the background. The same technique HL 2 did in 2004 for waxed floors. Crysis 1 reflexes were realtime. Oh, there are invisible walls.
Most of the textures were high resolution, and level detail is great anyway, the visual overal is really on par with the first game. So as long you're playing, it really looks nice. It really feels like a NY in ruins, and destruction effects are really well done, like the bridge falling. Models are not better or worse than in crysis one, they're on the same level. But there were some blurry textures too. I liked the background cars, they at least didn't look like those junk in other games.
About the plot, the plot holes didn't botter me, and in fact I don't think there was to much retconning. What bother's me is contradiction, and in fact there's not too much. Hole can be filled with imagination or just ignored. Contradiction, on the other hand are contrary facts and bothers me a lot, and I did not find to many of them.
But what really bothered me about the plot is how much a rip-off of halflife story line it is, and the feeling you're playing the first crysis all over again.
NY city is city 17 all over again, and hargreave is dr breen all over again. Tara would almost become an alyx, but you meet her only a few times. Gould is Eli vance. There's even tripods. Alcatraz is a silent protagonist, is caught in a word where he does what he is told to do, and has no clue on what's going on. In fact, the alien ship in crysis one, considered the worst part of that game, mirrors now Xen in HL1, the worst of that game. The evacuation of NY, on the other hand, felt like the evacuation of linghshan on the first game (which had an all new Iced enviroment that no one seems to remember, as they say it's all jungle).
The aliens, the Ceph, I liked how they looked different from the first game, but had some similarities. And the nanosuit being alien technology is cliché, but not so contradicting. The great contradiction was that koreans had suits in the first game, but they had an alien crash on their turf and its possible they could make suits themselves.
Last thoughts, I hope they bring back Psycho again. bik cutscenes had a bad quality, and I didn't like the way each level conected to the next. I'd like there would be no jumps between them. Oh, and in the ending, when the alien mothership explodes, NY is frozen too, which I missed from the first game, but since it exploded with all goodness from alcatraz, the sun melts it in one day.
The plot is just an excuse and they're not supposed to be magnificent, and the game can be fun if you're into FPS. But the things that came from consolization that made me rage were:
-No savegame (funny thing because I played the first crysis using only checkpoints because I thought it was like farcry, and only dicovered that I could quicksave by pressing f5 or f6 accidentally).
-The nanocatalys bug, which you would lose if you restarted the game).
-The first screen after installing the game being a brightness configuration that supposed I was using a TV instead of a monitor.
-Collectibles, though they're very few and easy to find.
-No advanced config mode.