This weeks sales chart is in from GFK and it’s not surprising to see Crysis 2 head to the top spot. I’m still getting over Homefront actually achieving number one last week (people really must be desperate to spend their money). Anyway, EA can be proud that Crysis 2 enjoyed a bigger opening weekend than Bulletstorm and Dragon Age II, two of 2011’s big hitters. It’s also good news for Crytek and PC development, especially when you factor in the early leak and the sales chart only being based on retail sales, making #13 respectable indeed. I’d be curious to see its Steam sales.
Hit the jump for the chart.
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Maximum profit. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
I can accept this game doing well. Homefront’s success boggles the mind though. It has like, a 3 hour single player campaign.
And Max, too funny.
What amazes me is the good reviews this game has been getting. Crytek is not known for making great games; I assumed Crysis 2 would be like its predecessor – a tech demo for an engine they’re hoping to sell. Instead lots of people are saying it’s actually worth the money in its own right.
Homefront’s sales befuddle me. Not one person has said it’s a good game, and yet it clears a million units in the first week. I guess Kaos Studios lives to be mediocre another day.
Homefront succeeding doesn’t surprise me. It ticks all the boxes to be pretty mass market, appealing to the Call of Duty crowd. I’m actually more surprised at the amount of people from that crowd who have actually stood up and criticised it, even if that is only judged against Call of Duty. It must be bad.
I think it’s a shame that it’s doing well at retail, actually. I thought THQ’s blasé attitude to just how much of a rip off of COD it is was pretty vulgar, to be honest.
I’m not sure about Crysis 2. The PS3 demo wasn’t just bad, it was downright insulting, to the point where EA actually pulled it from the store. It’s had strong reviews though and a good friend of mine has the full PS3 version and approves so.. who knows. Maybe it’s a £20 job during the slow summer.
I’ve played through and beat Crysis 2’s single-player campaign (360 version) and found it overall enjoyable. The Nanosuit’s abilities do a nice job of making the experience slightly differet from the standard FPS fare, as well as making the player feel empowered, which I always enjoy as a gamer. Activating camo and sneaking up behind an enemy to knife them in the throat is always fun. As is charging head-on into battle, running at your enemy, sliding underneath their gun-fire, giving them a shotgun blast to chest, turning around, activating armor, and just walking up to the next guy and picking him up by the neck and casting him aside like a rag-doll. Yeah, nothing wrong with that.
The game does start off pretty slow and boring and for the most part I found the sections where you battle the human soldiers pretty drab, but when things pick up and you are fighting the alien forces in full-on open battles, the game is a total blast.
It also helps that the game is very pretty to look at. Killzone 3 is still the best looking console game out there in my opinion (with Uncharted 2 second), but Crysis 2 is plenty gorgeous.
I’ve only dabbled in the multiplayer but I’m not very into it yet. I’m a one of those CoD players that find it difficult to get into anything that is not CoD unfortunately.
What people forget is that prior to Crysis, there was Far Cry – and it was a drastically better game, throwing you into freeform missions as a lone, crazy man in an awfully loud shirt, battling linearly placed mercenaries in wide open areas with surprisingly devious AI.
I spent many happy hours looting shacks for medkits and throwing rocks to lure angry American men in slightly quiter shirts into machete swinging range.
And then when things take a turn for scifi horror, it was honestly rather tense and featured some fantastic three way battles between mercenaries, ‘them’, and the player himself. Always loved watching AI fight, then involving myself – it’s one of the things Half-Life 1 did right…
Crysis, in comparison, was barely a game. It just felt messy. And when the aliens arrived, it was all I could do not to simply uninstall it. I’m surprised I managed to finish it – but in truth, I don’t even remember how it ended. It was damp and dark, I think.
I have no interest in Crysis 2.. They just lost my faith with the first one, and have done nothing to earn it back with the hype and media advertising the sequel.
Being pretty alone just doesn’t do much for me. I am presently finding the beautifully sculpted snowdrifts on Norwegian glaciers in ‘Hidden and Dangerous 2’ quite captivating, and this was made in the early 2000s using the Mafia 1 engine.. It’s something about -what- artists choose to depict, and the vibrancy and style of that depiction. Merely being high resolution, high definition, shiny shiny shiny doesn’t achieve anything in terms of atmosphere. Hell, it doesn’t even immerse me any more than the old games did.
Few games, thus far, have achieved anything with visuals. STALKER might be the only exception – its use of light, dark and subdued, realistic colours did a great deal to make me feel like I was on the Ukrainian moorlands.
Perhaps I’m just not a visual individual. I’m as guilty as anyone of not really seeing the world, but living in a haze of shortsightedness and expectation.. I just don’t instinctively use my eyes very much. I’m always lost in my imagination, based upon vague visuals cues, as well as auditory and conceptual.. I build a beautiful world inside my head without realising the game lacks one of its own.
That said, the richness of the sunrise at the beginning of Crysis was a powerful mood-setter. If only the Korean soldiers had had the wits to be a respectable foe I might have cared. AI is more important than diffuse lighting. When will they learn?! D:
Tanis: Crysis 2’s multiplayer demo put me strongly in mind of Modern Warfare – surely it can’t be that hard a transition? Modern Warfare 2 would have been far better with cloaking devices and the ability to jump 20 feet in the air ^^
lol, you would think most games would be better with cloaking and 20 feet jumps right?
In my limited playtime with Crysis 2 multiplayer, it seems most engagements tend to be determined by which player activates Maximum Armor first. So I find myself patrolling the level, looking for an enemy, as as soon as we spot each other, we both just activate maximum armor and unload a clip.
Granted that is simplifying everything a bit, and I’ve only played a handful of matches, so it is not a fair assessment.
But I’ve never been much of a on-line deathmatch player at all until CoD4 sucked me in. I was slightly disappointed with MW2’s multiplayer (they seemed to break more things than they fixed), but I am really, really enjoying Black-Ops so far and find it much more balanced and reliant on player skill instead of Killstreaks and over-powered weapons and perks.
And for the record I am a total graphics whore. Great gameplay can make me overlook mediocre graphics, but at the same time, totally impressive graphics that can immerse me in the gaming world can also enhance my enjoyment of an otherwise average gaming experience.
Was on the fence weather or not to go in for Crysis2…finally did….and am dissapointed.
Probably the dissapointment stems from the fact that this has the Crysis moniker and that I have played both Crysis and Warhead.
People who have not experienced the original might find this iteration upto their expectations.
Not that Crysis2 is bad…it’s fairly good….(in the gfx dept…consolish wise)….but the story just opens up rather too fast for my taste.
Crysis (for all the negativity it got for being a tech demo)..was imo a visual spectacle which unfolded at a leisurely pace..The first 30 min’s gradually exposed you to the surrounding without too much action…..The gradual transition from early morning to daybreak was sublime….I was breathing the cool morning air when I came across the first korean camp.
I could have ramboed in but I decided to soak in the atmosphere.
Most of the levels were laid out in a leisurely fashion.
This was something that I sort off missed completely in Crysis2…the sub sinking ….aliens straffing people on the water surface…waking up in a room full of dead bodies……it was too much too soon.
To some extent I did not enjoy Warhead as much as Crysis becauses the focus was imo too much on linear funnel type of combat sequences…..very little time for me to soak in and plan my attack.
Dont know if I will find the urge to complete Crysis2…though it seems that the levels and the action do come together nicely 2-3 hrs into the game.