On the crowded floor of EA’s behemoth booth at E3 2010, there stood a line that awaited patiently to see something special behind closed doors. Above those doors were copious “best of” awards from various publications. To the side, a decal—a soldier in a familiar nanosuit engaged in combat. This was the line for the demonstration of Crysis 2.

Upon queuing up, I squealed on the inside like a child in line to see Santa. Not only was I about to see the sequel to one of the best looking video games of all time, but we were going to be shown a real-time demonstration of the game on the PC platform. Of all of the media that has been released for Crysis 2 thus far, it has all been run on either the Xbox 360 or PS3 platforms. It was time to finally see what the PC version was visually capable of.

The demo we were shown was a short sequence from the now infamous Times Square portion of the game. New York lies in complete shambles as war is waged in all directions. The player, assuming the role of Nomad once more, is fighting humans and aliens alike in the burned out streets of the Big Apple. The action is intense and chaotic—attacks come from side alleys, from the air, from inside of buildings—it is total war. It didn’t take long to realize that Crysis 2 is a completely different game from its predecessor.

It was difficult for me to tell, based on what we were watching, how much of Crytek’s famed “go where you want” gameplay was intact. The demo had Nomad on the streets of New York, hiding behind broken chunks of buildings and trashed taxi cabs to return fire at the many enemies. At one point, Nomad kicked a car off of the elevated road he was standing on and towards an enemy robot that was on a side road. He fired a grenade to detonate the car and remove the threat. Soon afterward, Nomad used the strength mode to jump through a window of a nearby office building. The fighting continued in the tight hallways of the office. Computers and desks blew apart in spectacular fashion, fallen prey to errant gunfire. After dispatching many enemies, Nomad eventually jumped out of another window and back down to the street. It appeared to me that these situations were presenting multiple options for where the player could go on their choice. I would love to see a large portion of New York that is completely explorable, but until I have control of Nomad myself, it is difficult to tell just how much freedom is given to the player.

Eventually, Nomad finds his way to New York’s Grand Central Station, a designated safe area in the sprawling urban wasteland. After meeting up with a few friendlies, a massive walking robot crashes through the far glass, and an intense showdown follows from within the confines of the station. After Nomad is able to fell the juggernaut, he looks up through the glass sky lights just in time to see fireballs slam into the nearby “MaxLife” skyscraper. The building lurches forward—it isn’t going to last much longer. Realizing that the building is about to fall onto the station, Nomad is rescued by Marines in an armored car. The demo ended with a dramatic sequence of Nomad making a quick escape in the vehicle. Pedestrians are everywhere, trying desperately to escape with their lives. Unable to save them all, the MaxLife building crashes down onto the station and creates a spectacular cloud of dust and debris.

It is very clear that Crysis 2 will play nothing like the first game. Apart from the suit powers (which have actually been simplified a bit—gone is the speed power), very little of what gamers learned while playing Crysis will help when playing Crysis 2. This isn’t the familiar wide open world of guerrilla warfare. This is down and dirty, gritty urban combat. So very few times has a sequel dared to differ so much from its predecessor that I can think of only a handful of titles. This change of pace and setting will either greatly please or completely enrage fans.

How about the visuals of Crysis 2? There is no question that expectations are astronomical for Crysis 2—gamers place Crysis as one of the prime examples of photo-realism in games. To this day, three years after release, gamers still brag about how well their newest gaming build can run Crysis with maximum settings enabled. One thing is for sure – Crysis 2 is going to be a contender. Does it actually live up to the expectations, though?

From a lighting standpoint, Crysis 2 is leagues beyond everything else out there. The lighting technologies in CryEngine 3 are superb. I have never seen an engine handle the sheer magnitude of lightsources with the ease that Crysis 2 does. Light is coming from everywhere and casting shadows on everything. Search lights from choppers, yellow flames belching from car engines, and explosions from a rocket launch all add their light to the scene. The battlefield becomes chaotic with objects, combatants, and light sources dancing across the screen. The result is a true spectacle to behold.

When the fireballs crashed into the MaxLife building as Nomad watched from below, they cast a bright, orange light. As they passed over the skylights of Grand Central Station, every bit of framework between the panes of glass cast a shadow. This complex mesh of shadows (doubled, thanks to the second fireball) moved across the entire interior of the station. The effect was so impressive that I paid little attention to the actual impact with the building. Such a high volume of complex dynamic shadows is simply unheard of in modern gaming.

Beyond being able to handle a high amount of light sources in real-time, CryEngine 3 introduces other high-level lighting effects. Ambient Occlusion serves to approximate radiating light and shade areas of complex geometry to better reflect real-world lighting. This effect is difficult to see in the darkness of Crysis 2, but it was especially noticeable in the indoor areas.

To push that look even further, CryEngine 3 is the first real-time graphics engine to implement a global illumination model. Though not technically a true global illumination model, it simulates light bounce and even uses light propagation volumes to introduce color bounce and indirect lighting. What all of this means is that games using CryEngine 3 have the most realistic lighting effects ever seen in a video game. To make more sense of global illumination and light propogation volumes, the following video from SIGGRAPH 2009 illustrates the effects in CryEngine 3:

Everything in Crysis 2 looks fantastic. Texture work is just as good as it was with the first game. Clean, detailed textures appear on every object in the scene. Motion blur and depth of field blur are subtle and smooth—and are still the finest examples of the tech in gaming today. Sound design is loud and complex, the kind of stuff that can only be fully appreciated with a good pair of headphones or a surround sound system cranked to the max. Character faces treated with subsurface scattering and brought to life by the remarkable lip sync and facial animation return as well. Crytek has clearly built off of what they brought to the table with CryEngine 2 all while turning the dial to 11.

To me, Crysis 2 fully lives up to the expectations visually, with the bulk of the achievements in the lighting department. Sadly, most gamers will look at Crysis 2 and not see much of a difference, however. We are reaching an age in computer graphics where the major strides in technology are made in the minute details, and to the untrained eye, these details matter naught. At the end of the day, most will complain that Crytek hasn’t done enough with Crysis 2. The reality is quite the contrary—Crytek has made significant leaps forward in technology with the game, and they have paved the way once more for modern methods of computer graphics.