Crysis 2 has divided gamers with its move from natural to urban corridors and canyons. Its real story, though, starts in a corridor of corpses. It’s laundry day in a vanquished New York City, cages piled high with civilian clothes still wrapped around their owners, crawling with roaches and buzzing with flies. Just down the road, a subway station plays host to the damned – the sputtering, raging, walking dead. In the streets a crisis management programme is in freefall, pitch black agendas moving freely and openly.

This is still a pulpy old action game, of course, but one punctuated by moments of exquisite horror. That sickly gloop the aliens like to wear about town? Think Soylent Green. The fallen skyscrapers – all crooked masonry and garbled metal – are pure September 11. So too the streets fogbound by vaporised rubble, wandered by the wounded.

Like Cloverfield, a movie from which it seems to lift every other frame, C2 dabbles in the art of collective trauma. It raises many of the same ethical questions: of catharsis and metaphor – but only briefly, and largely through inheritance. Being a superhero game at heart, lacquered in Hollywood gloss and anamorphic lens flare, it seldom tries to enfeeble the player enough to summon the anxieties of 2001. Matt Reeves’ movie was labelled ‘9/11 porn’ by its critics and a modern masterpiece by its fans, a revival of the political 50s monster movie. C2 is more like 9/11 tourism, which is what you can expect when such tricky subject matter is left solely to a team of exceptional artists.

Incidentally, Cloverfield producer JJ Abrams had some interesting things to say about lens flare, largely in defence of another movie: his 2009 reboot of Star Trek. Insisting on lens flare as both an in-camera effect (achieved by shining ridiculously bright lights into the lens from out-of-scene) and one added to the CG shots in post, he wanted it to feel like something incredible was happening out of frame, as if the future was too brilliant a place to be captured by the camera. Lens flare, he added, added an organic element to otherwise sterile CG shots.

I can sympathise with this, especially in the context of a videogame. A single console command (r_glow 0) can turn off these effects in C2, and many players insist on it. I tried it and felt that it stripped a dimension from just about every scene. Screenshots have enough trouble capturing the feel of a game without motion, and this is doubly true when Crytek’s involved. But if you can’t capture the fullness of these incredible sets, maybe you can suggest it as Abrams did.

One more thing, this time about the image quality of this set. It was an eye-opener, this one, and a reassuring one given that C2 is presently a DX9 game which uses extensive deferred rendering. This is the first set where I’ve been able to achieve perfect image quality without forcing any kind of driver-level antialiasing. Having struggled with this kind of thing in the past, Crytek has implemented an outstanding shader-based AA solution for this game which, being a post-processing effect, smoothes the entire scene. Downsampled from 2160p, it gives the shots you see here the kind of flawless edges that normally cost you detail – yet Crytek’s method is surprisingly delicate. Brute force rendering and driver workarounds are not, it seems, the only ways forward.

PS: Be sure not to miss the offcuts for this set – another 100 images just a scroll of the mouse wheel away.

OFFCUTS

You can’t have a single without a B-side, right? I told myself a while ago that I’d stop posting gigantic, lumbering sets, and by and large I’ve stuck to that. Cutting this one down to 100 images, though? Impossible. Here, then, are the offcuts for Crysis 2 – 100 more images, many of which you might actually prefer to the ones above. There’s little rhyme or reason behind the selection, to be honest, though some of these might feature a glitch or two. Others are just different angles on the same shot, each of which has merit.