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When Crysis was first unveiled, questions were raised whether the graphics in the screenshots were comparable to the actual in-game graphics or will Crytek be able to deliver on their promises of open ended gameplay? I’m here to tell you today that Crytek simultaneously introduces new and interesting concepts while also falling victim to some design mistakes.

Story

Before we delve into the meat of the game, I’d like to touch briefly on the story of Crysis. The premise of the game is something out of your standard sci-fi B-Film aka most game plots. You play as ‘Nomad’, a soldier in the US Special Forces decked out in a nano-suit which grants the wearer the ability to boost his speed, strength, armour as well as enabling him to cloak for short periods of time. Set in the year 2020, Nomad along with his other teammates are dispatched to a remote Pacific Island to rescue an archaeological team that has been captured by an invading force of North Koreans. While trying to rescue the archaeological team, things go awry and the North Koreans unleash a deadly alien species onto the island.

The story is arguably one of the weaker points of the game not only for its generic plot but also for not establishing a connection between the characters and the gamer. In the early parts of the game, two of your teammates are ambushed and captured by an alien, which is then followed by a frantic chase concluding with the discovery that your teammates were horribly slaughtered by the alien. The problem for me with this sequence is that I had no emotional attachment to any of the characters and what was supposed to be a somewhat tragic moment came off more as a ‘so what’ moment. The end of Crysis felt like it was thrown together at the last moment. I won’t spoil it but I felt it ended a little prematurely.

Gameplay

Similar to Crytek’s first surprise hit, Far Cry, Crysis is in essence a “sandbox” style game meaning you can pretty much go anywhere. The game throws at you objectives to help guide you along the path. Some may criticize this game as a simple go from point A to point B objective based game but what is so interesting and innovative about Crysis is that it allows you to complete your objective in whatever fashion you like. For instance, you may need to enter a North Korean compound to deactivate some of their sensors. You may want to go in through the front gate guns-a-blazing, creating havoc everywhere or you may want to sneak your way through a crack in a fence and slowly pick off guards with your silenced rifle. You may even want to create a diversion via an explosion and then slip in without killing anyone. The options are completely up to you.

Another interesting twist is your nanosuit’s abilities. Each nanosuit ability gives you a diverse range of options on how you’d like to play the game. Playing through the game on ‘DELTA’, the highest level of difficulty, I found I was using the cloak ability the most, slowly picking off individual enemies from behind as taking on multiple enemies usually resulted in me hitting the ground in a short amount of time. That’s not say the other nanosuit abilities were useless. The strength ability allows you to jump higher or punch with extra force and can be used in some extremely creative ways. There was one instance where I spotted two enemies in a small shack. I selected the strength ability (maximum strength is the term they use in the game), jumped on the roof, punched the roof causing its collapse on one enemy, while I ran over to the other enemy, grabbed him and threw him through a wall, causing the shack to collapse and yes it was just as cool to do as it sounds. Almost anything in the game is destructible or interactive in some way or another which is really a nice touch.

AI

The enemy AI is top notch. Enemies realistically react to situations unlike most games where enemies will charge at you at the first sound of gunfire. The enemies in Crysis will take cover, call for backup, and flank you after backup arrives which adds a nice level of challenge and strategy. The game was obviously designed to reward stealthy gameplay as taking out enemies without them being aware of your presence requires only 1-2 bullets. If the enemies are aware of your presence then be prepared to unload an entire clip into them. The North Koreans must have developed some kind of fabric that can deflect dozens of bullets, making your nanosuit look like a toy.

There were a few times when the enemy AI exhibited bionic like hearing/vision and would seem to know where I was no matter how stealthy I was being. In fact even while cloaked and standing still, enemies would sometimes magically be drawn to my location.

Another annoyance was with the helicopters that could seemingly spot you from miles away, in a prone position, under a table, in a house basement while cloaked. The helicopters had the most ridiculous level of awareness of where your character was and made any part of the game involving them overly tedious and annoying.

Vehicles

You could drive almost any vehicle scattered around the island. Besides the tank though it felt like every other vehicle I was driving was a supped up go-kart with the durability to match. Driving by a group of enemies in a jeep would almost always spell death by exploding vehicle or hitting a bump would send me flying followed by going out in blaze of glory. Even with these faults, the vehicles are rather fun to drive.

There is one scene in which you have to fly a VTOL aircraft. To give you a better picture of what flying a VTOL is like in Crysis, picture yourself having one too many drinks then being asked to fly a plane with only your feet. You might have a better shot flying a real plane than flying the VTOL in Crysis. The handling is atrocious and trying to fire on enemies with poor handling is surprise, surprise … extremely frustrating and difficult.

Graphics

Crysis is hands down the graphical masterpiece we were all expecting it to be. Rarely have I felt so immersed or was compelled to just sit back and admire what I was looking at, that is of course if you have the gear to run this behemoth. Crysis was designed to be competitive with other graphical engines that are still a year or two off, meaning your current PC is going to cry every time you load Crysis.

Playing Crysis in Vista under DX10 is just not an option currently. I was playing on a top of the line rig in DX10 and couldn’t keep a decent frame rate on the higher settings. Not only that but I experienced frequent crashes on the title screen. It would seem Crysis was poorly optimized as a few tweaks to your game files can give you a boost to your frame rates while maintaining DX10 looking graphics. Links to tweak Crysis will be provided at the bottom of the review.

Conclusion

Crysis was an enjoyable experience despite a generic plot and the game falling flat during the second half. While Crysis did not deliver on all its promises, it did excel at creating a totally immersive game where you didn’t feel totally constricted by typical linear gameplay. The game does have a bit of lasting appeal in single player as you may want to experience the Delta difficulty setting for the full immersive experience – the North Koreans speak in Korean as opposed to English on the easier difficulties.

Multiplayer I can’t comment on as I couldn’t authenticate my Punkbusters client and thus ended up in servers where some invisible enemy kept killing me the second I spawned. Overall I would recommend Crysis to those who have the cpu power to run this game on the higher settings. The game seems to lack the same kind of immersive properties on lower graphical settings than the higher ones and feels more like a generic First-Person Shooter.

Verdict

8/10

Links

The Noob’s Guide to Optimizing Crysis

Natural Mod for Crysis