4 hours in now.
This is a game that is highly competent on all fronts, but never exciting, and designed with zero ambition. Crytek went into this desiring to funnel money into a successful, safe "AAA" game and nothing more. And that's fine for them to want to do from a business perspective, since they want to show off the potential of Cryengine 3 for development of typical sorts of games, much like Epic did with Gears of War, but it's very depressing as a fan of the original Crysis (and Far Cry before it).
Hiring Richard Morgan and Peter Watts has to be nothing more than a marketing bullet point, because so far the story amounts to "go here...now go here...now go here...oh shit! go here." There is no story, just a series of very, very thin excuses for traversing the environment from one enemy encounter to the next. I haven't done anything or experienced anything.
That wouldn't be so bad, but the combat is not particularly interesting either (on the highest difficulty). My tactical options are basically flanking with armor mode on or doing hit and run headshots with cloak, or just trying to avoid combat entirely. Everything's been so carefully designed to facilitate a specific set of multiple options in each set piece, and to wave these tactical options in your face (with the awful yellow overlays), that whatever I decide to do never feels like a good decision or a bad decision, but rather just a whim with no particular consequence. It reminds me of Deus Ex: Invisible War's design doctrine in that regard.
Nothing too surprising, considering what I knew going in, but it's still a shame.
