What's up with all the bland shooters nowadays that have 5 enemy types at most? Seriously, enemy variety is pivotal to any game, especially a FPS. But here all you do is fight human troopers for the first third of the game. There are technically two types of human foes: your everyday trooper and a captain type that can call for backup, but that's the only thing they differ at, except skin type of course. The rest of the game mostly consists of fighting samey light aliens, an occasional heavy alien, and a rare boss fight consisting of either an AT-ST-Walker or a HL2 gunship. And yeah, a couple of cloaked super aliens that you fight right at the very end, making that outrageously expensive cloak tracker upgrade worthless, since you don't even need it as you can clearly see them in nano-vision (the local version of thermal vision, oh those pretentious cretins from Crytek)!
The plot is retarded, heroes and villains alike have weak introductions and their reasons are poorly explained. Half of the time I wasn't sure what the hell was going on, despite it being a really simple story. But that simplicity hides behind the massive rubble of unnecessary jargon, poetry and pathos, as if it were trying to be a Shakespearean tragedy. Dudes, let it go, yet another fall of NY is as much a background for a Shakespearean drama as I am a ballet dancer. It's not impossible to pull off, but very, very unlikely and will require a lot more effort put into storytelling that you at Crytek could ever possibly manage. Yes, and stop making that nano t-shirt the pivotal plot device, or as the internet likes to call it nowadays: a mega "MacGuffin" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin]. The nano-suit is not a character, the only interest it evokes is purely academic, it's a freakin' tool for Pitt's sake! And the ending is completely, utterly and bastardly moronic. The only cool part I enjoyed about the plot was that the protagonist was in fact a walking zombie supported by the suit.
The game was also way too easy, I played it on the toughest difficulty setting and I can tell you: once you get an armor upgrade, the game becomes a walk in the park. Yes and later on when you acquire faster energy regeneration and reduced cloak energy drain, you can just run past most enemies unnoticed, eliminating the shooting aspect completely. There is another thing: half of the upgrades are completely useless, I will list them here: proximity alarm, air friction, air stomp, covert ops and tracker (plus that cloak tracker I already noted).
There are so many weapons in the game, yet you can only carry two main weapons at the time, which cuts the fun in using them in half.
I am mostly disappointed in one thing though: in earlier interviews with the Crytek guys they clearly stated it would be an open-world sandbox game with story events. When what we finally got was your typical "corridor" shooter. The corridors are spacey this time, but they're still corridors none the less.
I can only say two good things about this game: graphics are nice and shooter mechanics are solid, but really, did you expect anything less from a Crytek game?
Did I also mention this was a blatant HL2 rip-off?