I tried the MP demo on my old PC. They weren't exactly correct about it having lower system requirements than the first Crysis, but it runs on a 5 year old PC that won't even fit in the minimum system requirements. Not very well, but it is playable on something most games released in 2010 won't run. The first game ran at 20-50 f/s on medium on it. Not having accurate control from the interface regarding the graphics settings seems a bit counterproductive. I would have very much loved to be able to deactivate the HDR since older cards, like the x1950 have a very hard time getting it to look right/make it not blind me. 

I got my better PC back from the shop today, so I'll probably pick it up next week. I'm curious about one thing. Telescopic X-Ray vision, do they still have it? 

What you didn't write here is did you have fun while playing it? 

As example, for me DA2 was stupid and too console like and I did finish it but I cannot say I had a lot of fun and that is what is important in the end.  

Crysis sucks? Wow. Thats ummmmm... wow.

I've been playing it since I got home from class this afternoon. It's OK, though I have some complaints:

It's a definite console port, with all the pros and cons that entails.

While the game tries to offer you "tactical options"--such as the direct assualt, a sneakier back alley, or a height advantage--at key points, the levels are generally short and uninspired. Enemies seem to swing back and forth between blind as a bat and eagle eyed, making it hard to get a real sense of which path really allow you to be sneaky. I've had enemies detect me from the street while I was crouching in stealth mode in the sewer below them. Levels are also generally small in scale and linear, offering very little real freedom of movement.

Default controls are a little awkward, with some actions downright inconvenient to pull off, such as the slide (W+shift+C), or melee attacks (V). In multiplayer, pressing 1 switches weapons, 2 switches fire modes, which causes me a ton of trouble. I ended up remapping the keys to the Half-Life standard and a few to my mouse as well.

Ammo isn't exactly scarce, but you can't carry much on you at a time, which can get annoying at times as you scramble looking for an ammo box or a dropped gun.

Suit energy can be a pain as well, as it seems to drain quite rapidly. You're forcing you to constantly take breaks from the combat while you wait for it to restore, which really messes with the flow of the game.

Suit abilities have also been trimmed down. Speed is completely gone, instead you drain energy while you run, despite the fact you don't move any faster then would in any other shooter, and for shorter lengths of time. Power has become context sensitive, and you can activate it by melee attacking larger objects like porta-potties or smaller cars, though neither move far enough when hit to actually be viable in combat. Essentially the only time you'll use it is during scripted "Press V to power kick the door down in order to continue" scenes.

Stealth is my favorite, but it drains your energy more quickly than the other abilities, forcing you to unstealth and wait 5-6 seconds for your battery to recharge. Again, screwing with the pace of the game.

Armour is uninteresting. You take less damage, but you move very slowly, which in turn causes you to take more damage.

Muiltiplayer is heavily investing in the console conventions. Matches are limited to 16 players total, are fast paced, chaotic affairs in small arenas, many of them based on single-player levels, though they are more open and interesting.

Crysis multiplayer takes it's cues from Modern Warfare 2's/Black Op's multiplayer, awarding points for kills, with bonuses for melee kills, headshots, and the like. Collect enough and you level up and gain access to new weapons, customizations, and abilities. If you like the multiplayer in those games, you'll likely enjoy it here.

In multiplayer, your level and unlocks make a huge difference, giving a great advantage to more prolific players. This wouldn't be so bad if there was some sort of level-matching, but there isn't. In most of my matches I have seen one or two higher-level players dominating, or have been matched with an entire set of upper-tier players, and have have struggled to get a single kill.

Eh, there's more, but this is long enough as it is.

TL;DR:

It's a console port. It's OK. If you like console ports or the multiplayer in games like Black Ops, you will like this.

I heard NVIDIA was up to their old bribery tricks with this one, paying 2 million to EA to make sure the DX11 patch only works right for NVIDIA cards.  I don't really get why NVIDIA is still trying to divide the PC hardware market when console competition is at its strongest, but all they're accomplishing is losing sales from ATI users.  And future sales for NVIDIA cards as more people get disgusted with them.

I downloaded it from Steam, gave it a try and although it looks great and sounds awesome, I just didn't like the game play. More confusing that Call Of Duty, waaaay to many features which makes them hard to learn and even harder to execute not to mention they are already confusing to use. The game reminds me a lot of Bad Company 2 which I didn't like either because it felt, well, like a console game which was meant to be played with a controller not a keyboard.

Not my cup of tea. I'll stick with Modern Warfare 2 which, thanks to Black Ops (an even bigger failure) is low on hackers these days.

Efforts to 'de-consolize' Bad Company 2 were actually made in light of all the complaints from PC gamers over MW2.  They used it as marketing opportunity to come out and say, "Hey guys, BC2 is being built from the ground up to have dedicated servers and larger player counts!"

You know it's bad when EA makes someone else look evil.

I can agree, none the less the game play felt like something a controller would have been a better choice to play it with. MW2 felt more like the previous COD games even if they didn't include dedicated servers and took away the ability to create costume maps. I prefer MW2 to BC2, I bought both and have been playing MW2 consistently, especially after the crap that is Black Ops. BC2 has been collecting digital dust on my Steam account. i don't even have it installed.

Factual?

The initial screen in the PC demo said:  [PUSH START TO BEGIN] Pretty damning.

Also, check some dev interviews:

But obviously, you're really developing for the lowest common denominator, although we won't go into which console that is, the two versions have to be the same, right?

Yes.

On the original Crysis, though, you were working with no real limits, we'd love to know how you're finding it, comparatively, working within far stricter confines?

So, the way I approach that is, and this is an intentional thing for me, I say 'I really don't care if we can do it or not, we have to do it'. I am a programmer myself and made some of the engine. So when I say this is what I want and people say to me 'you can't have that' I say, well, I can have it in CryEngine 3. The upshot is don't tell me we have to compromise, find another way to do it. They have to find a way to experience Nanosuits and New York and the sandbox freeform experience, all of these things have to be a part of the technical execution. So when I say 'get me that' if it runs okay on PC, but not 360 and PS3 yet I say okay, that's not a fact, but there's only like one out of a hundred times that ever happens, then we don't do it. So what I'm saying effectively is that there's a narrow band of core experience which we pump through to all and then it's the engine which scales up and down based on the platform. And when I say 'up and down' it's more up on PC and then safe on console. There ultimately, there has been literally no compromise whatsoever, because I worked on it, not just as a PC game. Actually one was no different apart from the pressure of making it more positive and I didn't want it to make a PC-like game on console. I really wanted to make it an intense blockbuster experience on console, and then scale up on PC because the engine can.

Do you think PC gamers will be suspicious then of some features being cut because they don't scale down to consoles?

No, no, that's why I'm saying, like, perhaps you didn't understand me, we didn't make any downward revision. With any streamlining; it's not a matter of reducing scope. I'll give you an example of that, for example Nanosuit 1 vs Nanosuit 2. Nanosuit 1, at foremost, which setting shall we switch onto. You know, you have speed, strength, cloak, armour. You could choose one at a time, but then it was four choices. Thinking hard about it, we said 'how can we streamline that?' because it's a more complex concept actually, to begin with.

 Otherwise? Anyone familiar with both console and PC based shooters can spot the console conventions. Just to note a few:

-PUSH START: What other PC shooters prompt you to press a button to begin? I can't think of any off the top of my head, but every console game I've played from NES to PS3/360/Wii does.

-Extremely limited graphics options: Crysis had pages of graphics options. Crysis 2 has 4 options total.

-DirectX: Crysis used DX10, Crysis 2 has stepped back to use DX9, because the 360 is incapable of using DX10.

-Level Design: Compared to Crysis, the levels in Crysis 2 are terribly short and very linear, with limited fields of view. Simply put, the gorgeous horizons and vistas in Crysis are too much for the consoles to handle.

-Likewise advanced physics: You could use bullets to chop down trees in Crysis. You could destroy buildings. Both absent here, likely, once again, because of the limited power of consoles.

-Checkpoints: PC shooters allow you to save anywhere. Console shooters use checkpoints at the beginning of a level and before set-pieces. Guess what Crysis 2 uses?

-Multiplayer: 16 players max, small maps. Warhead had larger maps and higher player limits. In fact, the entire multiplayer design is a carbon copy of the MW multiplayer.

And it's not just limited to the above. So, yeah. It's a console port.

Wow, there's a lot of negativity in this thread, and I don't think all of it is enitrely deserved.

I'm just about finished the single player campaign, and I'll put up a review once I'm done, but frankly I've found it to be a whole lot of fun.  It's more kinetic, and much faster paced than Crysis was.  While Crysis gave you vast levels and tasked you with getting to the other side, Crysis 2's level are more like a funnel for the action.  To me, neither is better than the other in terms of fun - they're quite different and equally enjoyable!  I've never understood the mentality of "Game 2 must replace Game 1"  Crysis and Crysis 2 can stand along side one another and provide equally compelling experiences.

The biggest mistep the game makes is that it's story is so damn disconnected from the first game.  They could have called it "Nano York City" and no one would have guessed it was once a sequel to Crysis - merely a spiritual successor, like Bioshock to System Shock.  Rather annoyed at that, because Crysis really hooked me in during it's third act.

Now, is Crysis 2 a console port?  No bullshit answer: yes.
"Press enter to start" ?  That's a console trick to determine which controller slot the player is using.  With PC, we auto-detect this shit.
Non-destructible environments?  That's a move to supress the CPU drain on limited console CPUs.
Enemy intelligence that's phased in due to distance from the player?  Another CPU saving trick.
No DX10 or DX11 support?  Limitations of the Xbox 360 holding back the tech.

Is it a bad game?  Hell no.  It might be a smaller, more spectacle-orientated FPS than it's predecessor, however that still means it's better than some 90% of the garbage that floods the market.  Medal of Honor?  Homefront?  Please.  I'd take Crysis 2 over that trash any day of the week.

Some of the other things are actually design choices.  The small scale multiplayer helps keep the player from being spammed to death in a game where your opponents can be invisible, near-impervious to damage or jump down and one-shot-kill you in a moments notice.  64 players with that type of power?  No one would play it because no one would survive more than a few seconds.

In any case, I feel that Crysis 2 is getting a lot of flak it doesn't deserve.  Is it as good as Crysis?  Unless the ending is mind-numbingly awesome, no.  Is it better than anything Call of Duty has coughed up in the last seven years?  Absolutely.  Does it make Halo 3 look positively ancient?  Damn straight.  Does it make Medal of Honor look like the CoD wanna-be that it is?  No question.  Crysis 2 is a great game that doesn't live up to the original - which is one of the best games ever made.

Frankly, I think Crysis 2 is awesome.  They just need to fix the damn multiplayer.

Crysis

Crysis 2

Call of Duty: Black Ops.

I know which one I'd rather not play.

I hated Crysis 1, and I despise the COD series - I take it I won't like this one either?

Thanks for the heads up. I like the style, but I like the Crysis "universe" if you will, much better than CoD (I do own Black Ops on PC). I guess I'll give it some time.