The following information was compiled by our German community member Willy. Many thanks to him!
** SPOILER ALERT **
* 2023, three years after the event of the first game, aliens have turned huge parts of the world into a battlefield - e.g. Rio, London, Tokyo, NYC were attacked and depopulated.
* Aliens shoot probes (see the PC Gamer screenshot) into the cities and patrol the sky with spaceships.
* New York shall seem familiar but deformed to the player.
* Crysis 2 will have a much tighter and more compelling story.
* Good mix of arranged story snippets and information the player must collect himself - cutscenes, talks among the characters, tape recordings as in Bioshock and scanning corpses.
* Crysis series is meant to become a universe on its own, with its own backstory and many little details.
* Demo level: The level begins with two military helicopters chasing a bug-like alien spaceship, hitting it with a missile and causing it to crash into a skyscraper leaving a big hole inside. Demo mission objective: collect a DNA sample of the aliens at the crash site. Player fights his way through Manhattan Financial District. Destroyed city resembles New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Player approaches the crash site, sees it swarm with enemies and jumps up the collapsed stairway of a nearby building. Player marks the positions of the soldiers, draws nearer in cloak mode, smacks the gunner of a military vehicle in power mode, rips off the mounted gun and kills the rest of the foes. Debris blocks his way to the objective, so the player jumps down an old elevator shaft into a tunnel. In the semi-flooded tunnel's water there are indeed rats and corpses floating around. The tunnel ends at the center of the crash site in a small cave. The mood changes, colors are sparse and grey, building parts are scorched up to the steel frame, music and noise gets more threatening. As the player picks up the DNA sample, hell breaks loose. The protagonist is ordered to retreat as fast as possible, tries to escape through a side corridor, but gets stuck in a dead end. Through a window he sees enemies who are searching for him being taken down by an alien appearing behind them with frightening ease. The alien is standing on two legs, has a clearly defined outward appearance, some sort of armor and weapons, dangling dreadlocks and a ferocious-looking head. When the alien grabs one of the soldiers and throws him into the window pane with great force, the presentation ends.
* Prophet might be the protagonist of Crysis 2, at least, people in New York believe the player to be Prophet.
* Still four nanosuit modes: armor, power, tactical and infiltration.
* New nanosuit mode "tactical" allows collecting of information about enemies, corpses or weapons, you can mark enemies or weapons that appear on your radar from then on, so you get to know patrol routes and remember "where that cool weapon was located".
* "Strength" mode and "speed" mode have been combined into "power" mode.
* "Infiltration" mode is the stealth mode and makes the player move quieter and more cautious.
* Infiltration is a passive mode, you can manually switch on the familiar cloak mode as an active function and only then this mode drains your energy.
* Crytek always wants to make the player aware of which mode he's in.
* Tactical mode: ambient noise is suppressed so you can overhear even the most distant conversations.
* Armor mode: you hear the hardening of nanosuit's skin, moving sounds become much heavier and the hitting noise of bullets is different.
* Power mode: player uses his fists instead of the weapon's butt.
* Crytek still experiments with different HUDs to highlight the differentiation even more.
* Developer's answer towards question about civilians: "Every catastrophe has lunatics that ignore all warnings and stay".
* Streets seem to be deserted though, except for paramilitary troops patrolling.
* When targetting the enemies, they show up as "Crynet Ops Infantry" - Nathan Camarillo says, the name is not final.
* Nevertheless there's a third faction attacking the player as well as the aliens and this time they're not North Korean.
* Nanosuit modes can be modified with extra modules which extend your abilities. It is yet unclear how the modules are integrated into the course of the game, as part of a RPG-style leveling and upgrade system or by finding them during your playthrough e.g. tactical mode shows the direction from where you are shot, power mode reflects some of the shots you take and infiltration mode shows the silhouettes of enemies through walls.
* Player should be able to choose more freely how to approach a situation.
* Camarillo: "In the first Crysis, there were three ways to play: going rambo, stealthy or causing mayhem." Now, every attack shall be a new challenge for the player.
* New vertical gameplay: when in Crysis, you could only climb a car or a small hill, but now you've got more possibilities how to act.
* Not only you, but also the enemies use the different levels of the environment, shooting you from below or above.
* Camarillo tells us, that we "can assume that we will send the player to very well-known places in New York".
* The demo level was presented again directly afterwards with a quite differing course.
* The magazine editor states in his conclusion, that even though he "only" was shown Crysis 2 on an Xbox 360, he thinks that it is going to be one of the best looking games of all time on all platforms.