Crysis (series)/YMMV

"Colonel Lee Kim Sun: We respect the Geneva Convention. But the Nanosuit is not a recognized uniform. It invalidates your rights."
 * Acceptable Targets: North Korean soldiers serve as your primary human opponents in the first game.
 * The Big Bad of Crysis Warhead is a clichéd sociopathic Oriental.


 * The second game skips straight to "fighting Americans' number one hate figure... other Americans" in the form of CELL troopers.
 * Complete Monster: The North Korean brass do not come off well in the first game and its expansion. General Kyong doesn't do anything too henious, and even attempts some kind of What the hell hero on Nomad for killing hundreds of his men, implying that he at least cares about his troops. Colonel Lee in Warhead, however, completely lacks redeeming qualities and seems to enjoy killing and torturing captured enemy soliders.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Airfield from Crysis Warhead. Holy Shit!
 * Burning Night from Crysis 2. The piece really feels quite powerful; it's a shame it's so short.
 * Pyrrhic Victory, from Crysis' soundtrack. You feel like you can beat an entire army while listening. (Possibly missing the point of the title.)
 * Partially. The music plays in the final mission, and while the US got owned by the Ceph, you were kicking lots of ass while it played.
 * The Main Theme for Crysis II Insertion. That combination of eerie and majestic - goosebumps :)
 * B.o.B.'s "New York, New York" for the Crysis 2 commercials. The sampled piano melody of the Frank Sinatra hit kills, and 'Bobby Ray' lays out his most blistering lines yet for it.
 * Demonic Spiders:
 * The KPA Nanosuits and
 * It actually gets worse in Warhead; a major complaint about the original game is that once the . Later in  Crysis Warhead, they use squad tactics just like the North Koreans.
 * In Crysis 2, this title goes to the Ceph Heavies, which soak up a tremendous amount of damage and deliver just as much.
 * Disappointing Last Level: The first two thirds of Crysis have players traversing a vast open-ended environment populated by intelligent, squad-based human enemies, filled with side missions and numerous possible means of reaching objectives, and variable battle tactics that give players numerous means for handling each encounter with either stealth or aggression. Everything changes when the player enters the alien mothership in the seventh of the game's ten missions. First, they must complete a zero-gravity level, which is frustratingly difficult to control and easy to get lost in. After that, the player character emerges back into the same open world he had been exploring before, only now many of the paths are closed off and all the human enemies are gone, replaced with flying, hard-to-hit aliens who are far less intelligent than human enemies but take many more bullets to kill and render stealth practically useless. From there, the game turns into a linear corridor shooter, corralling players down a single path with no significant deviations and a commanding officer barking orders at them at regular intervals, all leading up to two long final boss fights that essentially amount to shooting a giant target a ridiculous number of times without dying, with no way to determine how close the enemy is to death until they finally kick it. Even with all these changes the game is still pretty good, but given the drastic, unexpected and above all completely unnecessary shift in style, it's easy to see why fans tend not to think highly of the final levels.
 * Ear Worm: Close Encounter. It plays in nearly a third of Crysis 2's "tactical arenas", ensuring you'll never get those cellos and violins out of your head.
 * Fan Dumb: Everyone is too busy screaming "consolitis!" to notice that a side-by-side comparison of the demo maps shows a noticeable gap in graphics quality between the two, for everything from lighting to HDR to number of objects to simple texture detail. The complaints about high levels of motion blur are also rather silly in lieu of the first game having an incredibly detailed motion blur system, to the point of applying the effect to individual objects as they move instead of just blurring the entire screen when the player turns their view. (That being said, the motion blur effect in Crysis 2 actually is less complex.)
 * Game Breaker: Proper use of the Invisibility Cloak mode can allow you to waltz through even the Harder Than Hard difficulty setting. It has been toned down a little in the sequel by putting a slight delay in the recharge time and making the enemy A.I. a little smarter and more aware.
 * Good Bad Bugs: The noble Ascending Frog.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: In Crysis 2, when Gould nags


 * Ho Yay: Poked towards Nomad and Psycho, lampshaded in Warhead.
 * Magnificent Bastard / Well-Intentioned Extremist: The curmodgeony, mysanthropic Jacob Hargreave, who reaches levels of successful, long-term manipulative deception previously seen only in Kane from Command and Conquer. For all his faults, it's hard not to agree that in most cases, his cold ways are the only option. Even Prophet acknowledges this.
 * Memetic Mutation: So, your computer's good, but can it run Crysis? No, it can't.
 * MAXIMUM [Noun]!
 * Most Wonderful Sound: Crysis 2's "Tactical Options Available".
 * Paranoia Fuel: In Crysis 2, the Ceph Guardians that appear periodically. They are actively stalking you, specifically, because the Ceph  And you never know if one is just hanging on the side of a building, watching you under its cloak....
 * Scrappy Level: "Ascension", where you pilot a VTOL that literally handles like a pregnant cow. It's somewhat bearable if you just fly straight to your goal, but try to do the evacuation side missions where you must dogfight fast-moving Alien Scouts with your VTOL, and you'll probably need a new mouse/keyboard in a few minutes. You have an unlimited ammo minigun and 12 homing missiles, but the former is weak and the latter are seemingly plain useless as the targets are all airborne and they act like dumb rockets unless you hold the reticle on one for long enough that it gives a slight white glow, and THEN they'll home in to great effect. On a slightly more cheerful note, your VTOL's health regenerates. Very slowly.
 * Note that "Ascension" may have been added late in the game's development, after they had cut an entire third act or so from the game.
 * "Ascension" was also cut out entirely from the PSN and XBLA ports of the game, suggesting either that Crytek couldn't or didn't want to program gamepad controls for the VTOL or, more likely, that they didn't think too highly of it either.
 * Warhead's Escort Mission. Delta (highest) difficulty level removes the ability to drive and use the turret of the APC. Instead of the character you are escorting drive whilst you gun, he drives off in a light humvee whilst you drive in an APC you need to stop driving and switch to the gun turret to use.
 * Tear Jerker: The 'Wall' trailer for Crysis 2 is pretty damn sad.
 * Also from that game,
 * That One Boss: Ceph Pingers have two different attacks that instantly drain all of your suit energy. They have a weak spot on the back, but they will ALWAYS face you, even if you're Cloaked, unless distracted by one of your allies. If you try to hide and recharge, they have a nasty habit of spamming more EMP, perpetually draining your suit. And you have to kill four of them!
 * There's a "boss" fight at the end of the freeway segment where you're piloting an APC in Crysis 2. The exit of the freeway is partially blocked, forcing you to go through a narrow doorway, and on the other side are two CELL APCs. They have anti-tank rockets which can kill your APC in one hit and fire in salvos of four at a time. Fighting past them is a frustrating challenge, but you have the option of just dismounting, going into stealth, and going around them.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: In addition to the "consolitis" outrages, the Crysis 2 Nanosuit has undergone some changes to "streamline" the Nanosuit's modes. Armor mode now reduces your maximum speed and drains your suit energy at a rather rapid rate (the same as walking normally in Cloak mode), and Speed mode and Strength mode have been combined into the suit's default Power mode.
 * Visual Effects of Awesome: If your specs are high enough, Crysis would actually look more realistic than real life.
 * The sequel looks slightly worse than the first game due to having to run on now-ancient consoles, but it does have one amazing new feature: real-time global illumination, the ability to simulate bouncing light and color without prerendering anything. Not only was this one of the final barriers to having games look exactly like real life, but it has the potential to kill the Real Is Brown trope for good.
 * There is now a DirectX 11 upgrade for Crysis 2. That is all.