Crysis 2

It's important to note that Crysis 2 is not a Halo-style spray-and-pray game. You cannot simply rush round a corner and blindfire in the general direction of an enemy, hoping his tentacly head will catch enough bullets.

This is a precision combat game. Accurate, down-the-sight shots are what will save Alcatraz from a painful return to his last save point. As this is also a Crysis game, if you find yourself close to your prey you can grab them by what you can only assume is their throat, then carry their squirming forms until you find something deep or amusing to throw them into.

Collecting the magic alien dust from each of your downed foes allows you to upgrade your suit's capabilities – enhancing its speed, armour, recharge, stealth capabilities and so on.

Yes, the Nanosuit is once again the star of the show. It's still great fun to sneak behind ignorant aliens while cloaked, dash with super-speed and biff a yellow taxi into an alien heavy's face (they look a lot like the old Far Cry Trigen heavies, incidentally).

However, existing Crysis fans may be disappointed that some of the Nomad fundamentals have been snipped, edited, or simply don't work as well in the world beyond mouse and keyboard.

The greatest pleasure of Crysis, once you got it running at a decent whip, was how organic the combat was. Having observed your prey, you'd put plans into motion which would inevitably go wrong. It was then a question of thinking on the hoof – deftly switching between your nano-powers within something of a gunplay sandbox.

To its credit, Crysis 2 does away with the irritation of your nano-batteries running out mid-fight. But there's now more limited environmental interaction, much of it context-sensitive. Powers like nano-biff and nano-jump don't merge quite as neatly into the flow of battle.

You can still pull off impressive moves – sneaking up to a taxi while cloaked and power-kicking it sidelong into an enemy, for example, then firing at its exposed petrol tank when a friend comes over to investigate the taxi's violent demise. However, the suit abilities didn't gel together quite as well in the section I played as they once did on a paradise island.

There are some other concerns. Crysis veterans will notice there are far fewer objects to pick up and throw at people in New York. I didn't get to revisit the delights of murdering an enemy by hurling a fridge at his head in the level I played, though I did at least frisbee a pizza box at a stampeding alien.

The game's tagging system (via which you can track enemies, and also now see tactical points to clamber on and ammo stashes to raid) made perfect sense in the wide-open vistas of Far Cry and Crysis. It doesn't work quite so well in the tight confines of the New York underground transportation network. Let's hope it comes into its own elsewhere in the game.

Putting these quibbles aside, there's no doubt Crysis 2 looks and plays like a barnstormer. The visuals are sublime and the feel of the weapons is astonishing. You can probably throw people off skyscrapers and you might even be able to visit the fire station from Ghostbusters.

With a little over a month until the game's official release, it's looking increasingly likely that the patience of those pining to tear up the New York streets will be rewarded.