New York is in crisis. With an alien invasion turning the city into rubble, it’s up to you to save the city. Armed with the most advanced armor, giving you the power of super strength, invisibility and tank-like-defense, you are an unstoppable force to be reckoned with.

“Crysis 2” is a first-person shooter recently released on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. It is the sequel to the previous graphics-card-destroying game “Crysis,” which was originally released only on PC in 2007. Crytek, the creators of the game, are some of the most well-known makers in graphics-intensive games, and they make your PC feel self-conscious.

When playing this game, the first thing I noticed is that your character is a dim-witted grunt who can’t think for himself. You follow anyone’s order as long as they have a working mouth and a brain, more or less like an obedient dog. This gets incredibly obvious when you find yourself following the orders of the enemies, whom he had been told repeatedly not to listen to. The fact that the character you play is nothing but a grunt leads to a bland storyline.

The silliest thing I found in this game’s story is that the enemies you face are super-advanced octopi. No really, the main antagonists of this game are called the Ceph, short for cephalopods, and they are evolved forms of octopi. Although I liked the idea of ancient beings that lived here before us, I thought it was incredibly stupid to be fighting calamari.

The overall game play is very fast paced and interesting. The game has a very cool feature that maps strategic locations, letting you plan your attack using nano-vision to see waypoints, weapons caches and other valuable information. I found it to be extremely useful, and I enjoyed setting up various schemes to subdue my enemies, although things didn’t always turn out the way I planned. The ability to turn invisible can help set up ambushes, while the armor mode turns you into a tank, giving you the ability to run up to the enemies and introduce your fist. The power ability allows you to run at incredible speeds and jump great distances and heights, which can make you feel as though you were an acrobat from Cirque du Soleil.

One thing I found to be an improvement since the last game is that they smoothed out switching between the suits abilities in “Crysis 2,” and it made combat much more exciting and fast paced. Using all these abilities in combat felt like second nature because of how smooth switching back and forth between abilities is.

The abilities are fun and the areas you fight in are large, giving you flexibility in combat.

Other than the fighting mechanics, tech-porn was probably the biggest reason that kept me from advancing throughout my single-player experience. Because of the amazing work on the graphics engine, the scenery got me killed on several occasions. Every place you go is beautiful. Even though it may mostly be rubble, it is beautiful rubble.

What the story of the single player lacked in was made up for with good combat, especially with some of the bigger enemies, not to mention the amazing graphics of this game on a console or PC. But I found myself having the most fun on multiplayer mode. The multiplayer experience was fun: It is essentially “Call of Duty” with super powers. The multiplayer mode is extremely fast paced, which kept me on my toes; I expect this from all multiplayer shooters. There are multiple modes you can play in, such as Capture the Flag, King of the Hill and Deathmatch. Like “Call of Duty,” “Crysis 2” has a perks system, in which you can customize your guns and perks by leveling up. The way you level up is by getting kills in games. The perks system somewhat tiring, as I found myself in games with people 40 levels above me. Because they had much better weapons and upgraded perks, it was difficult to level myself up.

Even though I do find it frustrating at times, it is still fun, and I find myself playing it longer than I should from time to time. This game is worth a try if you are an FPS fanatic or a tech geek who wants to see his parts go to work. Even though this game could use a little polish, I wasn’t too disappointed and gave it 4 stars.