Just hear me out. I'm not a generic "THIS GAME PWNZORS ITS A 10!!!!!!!!!"
I was hooked.
Bought it right after finishing the demo. Let me start with the presentation in the game.
The menus are solid. Easy to understand and change whatever you want. Almost every graphical quality is adjustable, and there's a ton of little things which along the review, you'll understand: These little things morph into a huge monster which will kick your PC's butt. Even the crosshair and the Weapon Inertia can be customized.
Do I really need to say anything about the graphics? You all know it. C'mon, don't make me waste my characters.
The sound is pretty good as well. Awesome (but really cheesy) voice acting, impossibly good synching of the sounds with the destruction (if you blow up a house for example, the noise will be coherent and it'll make a sort of splash noise when the alluminum hits the ground, and not some random sounds of concrete breaking), and yes, you CAN blow up houses and shacks. And trees. You can CUT DOWN TREES with guns. They won't just weirdly tumble and fall down like in Battlefield Bad Company for example: Depending on where you shoot a tree, it'll be broken exactly where you shot it. Flowers and leaves will react to bullets and explosions, and it's just such an immersive world, you can forgive its minor shortcomings...
...Like the character physics. When you kill an enemy (a human one, at least), he'll spin around like crazy and do some rave dancing before hitting the ground. At least in character animation, Havok is clearly superior to PhysX. There's also some weirdness when sharks (no there are no invisible walls that stop you from swimming into the pacific ocean for eternity. There are sharks that'll rip to shreds) follow you too, and when something hits an animal (mud crabs, chickens, etc). They have the same problems as the character death animations.
This is one of the few FPS' where the character you control is actually a physical part of the environment, instead of a floating camera with a gun. In this game, if you get too close to a wall, the character will retract his arms. If you look down, you'll see legs (hooray!). If you jump, you'll see the jumping animation... If you look behind you, you can see the character's shadow. What's even more awesome about the character animation is that if you're in Cloak Mode (one of the neat powers you super battle armor gives you), which makes you invisible, the shadow will disappear. How many game developers would think of that?
Now let's get moving with the gunplay and overall gaming experience of Crysis. The best description for it is: It MAKES SENSE. The gunplay isn't as fluid and functional as Call of Duty 4 for example. Instead, it tries a more realistic and "heavy" (like in Killzone 2) approach. When aiming a sniper rifle your gun will move around, won't be as steady as in COD4 for example. Though if you use one of the Nanosuit's abilities (the super armor mentioned before), which makes you a lot stronger, you can get a better, more firm grip on the gun, which will make it move less. There's an energy bar for your suit, which will be drained as you use it's abilities, which are: Cloak Mode, which makes you invisible, Speed Mode, which makes you run faster and sprint as fast as a Bugatti Veyron, Strength Mode, which will make you stronger and allow you to deal more damage when throwing objects at enemies (like barrels and pieces of destroyed shacks), make your melee attacks more powerful, give you the ability to grab heavy enemies and throw them, give you a better grip on your gun and make you throw grenades farther away, and Armor Mode, which is self-explanatory.
Shooting feels right. The gun won't tremble or jam or have a crazy recoil like that of Far Cry 2's for example. It's not designed to be very immersive, it's designed to work. It's solid. Nothing to complain about. Except when you're firing at long range targets, in which case your gun will barely deal any damage. That's an annoying little problem which was thankfully fixed in Crysis Warhead.
The game is an open-ended shooter. Which means it's still a linear game, you can't choose what order you do your missions in or when, but instead of giving you and very narrow path like COD4, it gives you an incredibly wide path and many possibilities to reach sites you need to attack -- or not.
In the second half of the game you'll meet the aliens. I don't want to reveal any of the plot here, but after hthe aliens are unleashed, the game becomes very story-driven. There's always a piece of dialogue telling you what's happening, a cutscene, and you can clearly see that Crytek is trying very hard to give Crysis a meaningful story and make the aliens seem like a menace and make you care about this world. Not that it wasn't believable from the beginning. Crytek wants Crysis to be recognized as a franchise with a meaning, much like Halo, and not another mindless shooter that'll be remembered only for it's gameplay and didn't leave any marks on the modern gaming world.
I didn't mention other strong details that make this game an even more enjoyable experience, like the ability to lean using Q and E, the variety of grenades, the possibility to choose between fire modes (full auto or single shot), the Weapon Customization, which is awesome. You can add scopes, silencers, flashlights, grenade launchers and really customize your gun so it'll fit a little better into your play style. Other details include the fact that a bullet will be left in the chamber when you reload, so when you do, the weapon won't be full at 40 rounds, it'll be full at 41 (40 from the mag, 1 in the chamber). And again, it's all these little details that appeared in other games, but not this many and not as polished that make Crysis an incredible game that must be experienced by ANYONE. If you have a poor computer, just run everything on Low. It's worth it, trust me.