Contained within Crysis 2 is a critique of video games that is as poignant as Bioshock’s, but Crysis doesn’t spell it out. The game takes to task several tropes of the shooter genre: the one man army, the role of power armor, the silent protagonist, and the modern military hero.
The star of the game is a marine named Alcatraz who is for all intents and purposes killed at the outset. The only thing keeping him alive for the rest of the experience is the Nano Suit given to him by its previous owner, Prophet. Crysis 2 is calling out every game where the protagonist goes through an entire game’s worth of set pieces and death defying action where they come out unscathed. Here, the lead can’t go longer than five minutes without becoming mortally wounded.
Without the Nano Suit Alcatraz wouldn’t have been able to survive the game’s opening. How many other heroes would be useless without their suits? Gordon Freeman, the Master Chief, Samus Aran, and Sam Gideon are all characters rely extensively on their suits’ powers. They’d hit the floor in about the same amount of time it took for Alcatraz to get shredded by alien gun fire. In Crysis 2, the main character is literally nothing without his armor. He’d be just another casualty of the alien invasion.
Many games feature silent protagonists, from the original Dead Space to the Half Life and Doom series. Almost every time its use as a mechanic isn’t justified in the fiction. There’s no physical reason for Gordon Freeman to be as stoic as he is. Rage is another example of a game where there is no reason that the player character should be so quiet. If I had just stepped out into a post-apocalyptic wasteland after years of being asleep I would have an endless list of questions for everyone I met.
Alcatraz physically can’t talk because he’s a blob of jellied meat that is only being held together by the suit of armor he’s wearing. The suit needs a living human inside of it to function, it doesn’t matter what state that person is in, as long as they’re technically alive. The abuse doesn’t stop at the beginning either. Alcatraz is killed twice during the course of the game and the suit deploys a defibrillator to keep him alive. Alcatraz is trapped in a very special kind of purgatory, one where he is still alive but isn’t, and one where he can’t die because the suit won’t let him. Until the suit’s purpose is completed, Alcatraz will keep being its marionette puppet.
The ending of Crysis 2 further erases the pilot’s free will and identity. The stored personality of Prophet inside the suit seems to take over and override any trace of Alcatraz. Even the voice that comes out of the suit during the end cutscene is that of Prophet.
Most shooters feature their protagonists going through the linear motions of the experience with little input of their own. They go through the proceedings like a zombie. The main character of Crysis 2 is literally a zombie, kept animate by an intelligent suit of armor. The armor is programmed to do everything it can to fight the alien menace, and this is what it does. Alcatraz takes orders from anyone barking them at him because that is all he can do. A lot of games run along similar paths, but Crysis 2 is a rare gem for providing a thought provoking narrative justification for it.