A good story and a compelling adventure game, Cryostasis has its flaws but these are outweighed by its originality.
Cryostasis as a product has many things going for it, it has good graphics, a certain amount of polish, an interesting scenario and a compelling and meaningful plot. But it certainly has some weaknesses too, there are some bugs and the game is pretty demanding. My computer handles it ok on Maximum resolution and settings but the frame rate does drop in places so I had to turn down one or to of the settings to ensure it was always playable. My specs: Intel core I7, 6GB RAM, ATI 4900 1GB. So to make this clear, Cryostasis is more demanding than crysis, you might want to give it a miss is you don't have an upto date gaming machine.
On the whole I enjoyed the game and it's certainly great value for the price you can pick it up now. the game has depth and if you wait past the credits at the end you are presented with a quote from a certain Russian philosopher which encapsulates the moral of the game.
Review:
N.B I don't include any significant spoilers in the rest of my review but I do go into the gameplay in detail, this might constitute spoiler(s), so be warned, however I don't give any specific details of the plot.
The game is approximately 25 hours gamplay spread over 17 or so chapters. You are a meteorologist, Alexander Nesterovit, posted in the arctic; you have received a radiogram telling you to meet up with the Nuclear Icebreaker the North Wind, the radiogram is dated 1981. The game starts with you reaching the North Wind with your sled and dogs to find that it is ice-locked and apparently was wrecked several years earlier, you make your way onto the frozen ship and things very quickly get weird. There are various elements of the game that go unexplained one of which is the fact that you are some sort of psychic and are able to inhabit the mind of a dead person just before they died and help them to avoid their death. Your journey through the ship is a matter of saving people in this way and so also averting various problems and disasters that lead to the downfall of the ship, though flashbacks and these instances of psychic possession you get to slowly piece together what happened to the ship and the people on board.
However, there is more to it than that as the crew have turned into some sort of ice zombies/ghosts and they will do their best to stop you and keep the ship frozen.
The game has some innovative aspects to it including the graphics, which do a tremendous job of conveying the icy conditions with detailed frost patterns, snow, and cold haze; also when an area heats up you get to see it thaw and the frost will slowly melt and slip down the wall turning into running water. You could accuse the game of over using these effects but you never really get tired of it and it fits exactly into the plot of the game, so it doesn't feel out of place.
One thing you do get a little tired of however is the prevalence of frozen metal corridors, naturally the blandness of the interior is authentic to the reality of a working ship, but still, 25 hours is a long time to traipse down frozen corridors.
Another innovative aspect of the game is the use of temperature beyond visual effects, you have a gage in your HUD showing room temperature and your personal temperature, it also shows how fatigued you are. Your body temperature will slowly (or not so slowly in some cases) normalise to the room temperature, which generally means you loose body temperature (as the ambient temperature is freezing) and need to make your way from one heat source to another to restore/top-up your personal heat.
Your heat also acts as a health of sorts, you are constantly running into and being attacked by ice ghosts/zombies who when they hit or shot you reduce your body heat much like taking damage, conversely when you attack them you can see the heat bloom on their body as they take "damage".
The whole game, without saying too much, plays out as a battle between heat and cold, when you successfully complete an area it defrosts and the effect is that you are slowly bringing the ship back to life, however the forces of cold personified by the ghosts/zombies will be trying to stop you.
One of the major flaws of the game in my opinion is the use of the ghosts/zombies, they come in several different types but but they are perhaps over used and predictable, to start with the game is a little scary but I think developers must of run out of time (when don't they) or something because after initially introducing each type of zombie with properly scripted scenarios they just chuck more at you at predictable places and they attack you in a predictable way. On the whole Cryostasis isn't scary, if it aimed for scary then it missed.
Cryostasis makes extensive use of weaponry like an FPS and in fact you could call Cryostasis an FPS game, you have weapons from a chain, and axe, a flare gun, to period rifles and submachine guns (2nd WW era). This FPS element is perhaps why the developers over used the zombies - to keep up the action, but really they would of been better served in focusing on the adventure element and building suspense to make it more scary.
There is a major bug in chapter 12 I think it is, you might be able to avoid it by playing through the chapter without stopping but if you save the game then load it up to continue for some unknown reason no-clipping and fly modes are turned on, you have to go into a config file and enable the console then type in the console commands d.fly=0 and d.noclip=0 to get back to normal. Don't know how that one got past QC.