Welcome to the "Next Generation" of PC Games.
Crysis is by far one of the most visually stunning games released to date and tries to streamline the First Person Shooting genre but is hindered by glitches, high system requirements, and a rather run-of-the-mill plot.
Don't get me wrong, my system is more than capable of playing Crysis, but I know that for a friend of mine, the system requirements were the exact reason he didn't end up purchasing the game. And I know that for many gamers, that will be a bone of contention, just like Supreme Commander and Doom 3 before it. So for all the 'would-be' Crysis owners out there, make sure to read the box and get those system requirements before you sink 50 dollars on a game that will be a glorified slideshow on your computer.
Before I begin on the game itself though, I want to make it clear that I am reviewing the vanilla 1.00 release of Crysis, not the most recent 1.20 Patch.
After installation and configuring settings, Crysis drops you right into the action. Literally. And the game takes it from there and runs. You play as 'Nomad,' a group of US Delta Force agents sent to rescue several scientists on a Pacific Island that has been taken over by North Korean Military group in order to cover up whatever it is the scientists have found. But even in the intro, the plot of the game stumbles over itself and does a bad job of making anything particularly mysterious. Maybe I'm looking at the game the wrong way, but by the time Nomad quite literally crashed into the water from your team's botched jump onto the island, I had the first few scenes almost called to the letter. Now, this wouldn't be that big of a deal for Crysis if it hadn't come out in the wake of Bioshock and Half-Life 2: Episode Two where narrative actually keeps you going and keeps you engaged. Crysis on the otherhand feels like a run-of-the-mill Sci-fi Action Flick.
The main thing though that everyone will notice the second their game starts is the visuals. This game's presentation is stunning and it is still giving other games that have since come out in '08 a run for their money. I'd go so far as to say that it beats Metal Gear Solid 4's visuals easily, and anyone who's had a chance to play that game on a large 1080p display knows that is no simple task. One thing that really had me impressed were the character models. The first time you see all your comrades with their helmets off in the first scene is just amazing. Crytec has made characters that actually look human without falling face first down into the uncanny valley and they're one of the few developers out there who have managed to not make their characters look like they're at least partially plastic. But my admiration of the visuals was abruptly cut off when I killed a foe and his texture glitched, consuming the environment in front of me and making it significantly harder to navigate until I looked away from the visual space he decided to occupy. I wouldn't be complaining and docking the game too much if this had been a one time thing, but it happened again. And again. And then it happened with a group of enemies that weren't even dead, but they were supposed to be cloaked. It basically turned into me shooting into gigantic-korean-foe blobs that had devoured my screen, while I hoped that I'd manage to actually hit him and get his glitched existence out of my face.
For all of those people starting Crysis for the first time though, there is one other thing you'll notice. The mandatory nanosuit teaser scene before the game actually gives you control. This scene channels modern hollywood action flicks and shows off the fancy nanosuit you'll be wearing in the game. This nanosuit is the main gameplay feature that anyone following Crysis has heard about many times. Simply by holding down the middle mouse button, you are presented with a radial dial that allows you to change which mode your suit currently has engaged from the four available modes: Cloaking, Armor, Speed, Power. Cloaking is fairly self-explanatory. You turn effectively invisible at long ranges, but your suit's power drains quickly so long as you're in motion. While cloaked, enemies will still be able to hear you and will fire at those noises and going invisible in front of your enemies will only get you so far if you aren't booking it away from them because it won't stop them from shooting at you. But, alas, cloak was kind of a deal-breaker for me. Through most of the beginning of the game, if you have a habit of almost never using ammo and conserving as much as possible, you'll probably quickly figure out that if you slowly move around your patrol of foes while cloaked and then just switch to speed if needed, you'll be able to avoid many conflicts. It changes the feel of the game from an action game to a stealth game set to "way too easy." I had figured that I'd be able to use the cloak to ambush enemies or pull off predator-esque attacks, but in the end I realized most of that effort was better spent not even wasting rounds on the normal AI. Back to the other three abilities. Armor makes you take less damage from all sources, including fall damage and will allow you to regenerate at a very fast rate if you stay still. Speed allows you to move faster, and if you engage your sprint, you'll move exceptionally fast, but only for a brief burst. Power increases your overall strength- allowing you to throw things farther, jump higher and hit harder. All in all, the system works, and it is fun during the more tense scenes, but sometimes it feels too easy to dupe the AI.
That's not to say that the AI isn't good, in fact, the human AI is all executed incredibly well. Enemies will react to your movements and the noise you make and generally try their hardest to flush you out where ever you may be, especially on higher difficulties (as an interesting little tidbit- at the highest difficulty, the game introduces the language barrier, causing the North Koreans to actually speak Korean) but that doesn't mean you can't ever manage to elude them, as I have previously written. In one scene, I had found a very nice sniper ledge, pulled out my rifle and fit it for silent sniping (customization is another big feature of the game, and I'll touch on that in a bit) and slowly picked off the guards in the camp, but I noticed that they began to follow the shots and eventually I had to deal with a search party that arrived at my location, so the AI can and will find you if you stay still and don't neutralize them quickly.
The last big feature I want to talk about is the customization. At more or less anytime, you can press the customization key on your keyboard and the focus will shift to your weapon (and will add a little Depth of Field blur around the edges for effect) and you will have all sorts of add-ons and choices depending on the weapon, ranging from supressors to reflex sights and scopes depending on the situation. It definitely has its uses and it works seamlessly with everything else, so all in all, I like it.
Crysis is a good game. It is a solid shooter, and anyone looking for a game to play that has a PC to run it won't be disappointed. But do I think it was game of the year material? No. It has its shortcomings and its flaws and overall just feels like one of those generic shooters that you might play through a couple of times and be done with. It has an enjoyable multiplayer that you may or may not get into, depending on your views of competitive shooters, so you've always got that to look at as well once you've wrapped up the story and its obligatory cliff-hanger ending for the already announced sequels in this trilogy of games. With some polish, I'd say that Crysis definitely holds promise as a series in the future.
Don't get me wrong, my system is more than capable of playing Crysis, but I know that for a friend of mine, the system requirements were the exact reason he didn't end up purchasing the game. And I know that for many gamers, that will be a bone of contention, just like Supreme Commander and Doom 3 before it. So for all the 'would-be' Crysis owners out there, make sure to read the box and get those system requirements before you sink 50 dollars on a game that will be a glorified slideshow on your computer.
Before I begin on the game itself though, I want to make it clear that I am reviewing the vanilla 1.00 release of Crysis, not the most recent 1.20 Patch.
After installation and configuring settings, Crysis drops you right into the action. Literally. And the game takes it from there and runs. You play as 'Nomad,' a group of US Delta Force agents sent to rescue several scientists on a Pacific Island that has been taken over by North Korean Military group in order to cover up whatever it is the scientists have found. But even in the intro, the plot of the game stumbles over itself and does a bad job of making anything particularly mysterious. Maybe I'm looking at the game the wrong way, but by the time Nomad quite literally crashed into the water from your team's botched jump onto the island, I had the first few scenes almost called to the letter. Now, this wouldn't be that big of a deal for Crysis if it hadn't come out in the wake of Bioshock and Half-Life 2: Episode Two where narrative actually keeps you going and keeps you engaged. Crysis on the otherhand feels like a run-of-the-mill Sci-fi Action Flick.
The main thing though that everyone will notice the second their game starts is the visuals. This game's presentation is stunning and it is still giving other games that have since come out in '08 a run for their money. I'd go so far as to say that it beats Metal Gear Solid 4's visuals easily, and anyone who's had a chance to play that game on a large 1080p display knows that is no simple task. One thing that really had me impressed were the character models. The first time you see all your comrades with their helmets off in the first scene is just amazing. Crytec has made characters that actually look human without falling face first down into the uncanny valley and they're one of the few developers out there who have managed to not make their characters look like they're at least partially plastic. But my admiration of the visuals was abruptly cut off when I killed a foe and his texture glitched, consuming the environment in front of me and making it significantly harder to navigate until I looked away from the visual space he decided to occupy. I wouldn't be complaining and docking the game too much if this had been a one time thing, but it happened again. And again. And then it happened with a group of enemies that weren't even dead, but they were supposed to be cloaked. It basically turned into me shooting into gigantic-korean-foe blobs that had devoured my screen, while I hoped that I'd manage to actually hit him and get his glitched existence out of my face.
For all of those people starting Crysis for the first time though, there is one other thing you'll notice. The mandatory nanosuit teaser scene before the game actually gives you control. This scene channels modern hollywood action flicks and shows off the fancy nanosuit you'll be wearing in the game. This nanosuit is the main gameplay feature that anyone following Crysis has heard about many times. Simply by holding down the middle mouse button, you are presented with a radial dial that allows you to change which mode your suit currently has engaged from the four available modes: Cloaking, Armor, Speed, Power. Cloaking is fairly self-explanatory. You turn effectively invisible at long ranges, but your suit's power drains quickly so long as you're in motion. While cloaked, enemies will still be able to hear you and will fire at those noises and going invisible in front of your enemies will only get you so far if you aren't booking it away from them because it won't stop them from shooting at you. But, alas, cloak was kind of a deal-breaker for me. Through most of the beginning of the game, if you have a habit of almost never using ammo and conserving as much as possible, you'll probably quickly figure out that if you slowly move around your patrol of foes while cloaked and then just switch to speed if needed, you'll be able to avoid many conflicts. It changes the feel of the game from an action game to a stealth game set to "way too easy." I had figured that I'd be able to use the cloak to ambush enemies or pull off predator-esque attacks, but in the end I realized most of that effort was better spent not even wasting rounds on the normal AI. Back to the other three abilities. Armor makes you take less damage from all sources, including fall damage and will allow you to regenerate at a very fast rate if you stay still. Speed allows you to move faster, and if you engage your sprint, you'll move exceptionally fast, but only for a brief burst. Power increases your overall strength- allowing you to throw things farther, jump higher and hit harder. All in all, the system works, and it is fun during the more tense scenes, but sometimes it feels too easy to dupe the AI.
That's not to say that the AI isn't good, in fact, the human AI is all executed incredibly well. Enemies will react to your movements and the noise you make and generally try their hardest to flush you out where ever you may be, especially on higher difficulties (as an interesting little tidbit- at the highest difficulty, the game introduces the language barrier, causing the North Koreans to actually speak Korean) but that doesn't mean you can't ever manage to elude them, as I have previously written. In one scene, I had found a very nice sniper ledge, pulled out my rifle and fit it for silent sniping (customization is another big feature of the game, and I'll touch on that in a bit) and slowly picked off the guards in the camp, but I noticed that they began to follow the shots and eventually I had to deal with a search party that arrived at my location, so the AI can and will find you if you stay still and don't neutralize them quickly.
The last big feature I want to talk about is the customization. At more or less anytime, you can press the customization key on your keyboard and the focus will shift to your weapon (and will add a little Depth of Field blur around the edges for effect) and you will have all sorts of add-ons and choices depending on the weapon, ranging from supressors to reflex sights and scopes depending on the situation. It definitely has its uses and it works seamlessly with everything else, so all in all, I like it.
Crysis is a good game. It is a solid shooter, and anyone looking for a game to play that has a PC to run it won't be disappointed. But do I think it was game of the year material? No. It has its shortcomings and its flaws and overall just feels like one of those generic shooters that you might play through a couple of times and be done with. It has an enjoyable multiplayer that you may or may not get into, depending on your views of competitive shooters, so you've always got that to look at as well once you've wrapped up the story and its obligatory cliff-hanger ending for the already announced sequels in this trilogy of games. With some polish, I'd say that Crysis definitely holds promise as a series in the future.
