One of the grandest, most beautiful, and inventive titles for the PC.
There are inevitable comparisons to be made between Crytek's previous game Far Cry and Crysis. Both take place on a lustrous island, against military forces and also strange and deadly monsters. Both games are strikingly beautiful, with their gorgeous tropical colour palettes. Crysis, as the hype suggested, is the most beautiful game on almost any platform. The draw distance is just remarkable in allowing you to see the various islands from miles away. The attention to detail towards the vegetation of the island is one that immerses you so well into your surroundings. There are moments in the game where the view is so gorgeous that you feel as though the developers just wanted to show off this technology. The blue glow of the water and the sheer scale of the game – with load screens only in between missions – are just some of the visual treats that are held within Crysis. The only thing to suffer from the beauty of the game is the system requirements, which are extremely high. The frame rate is simply atrocious at times. It is a remarkable and rich world that demands the best hardware to be fully appreciated for all it can offer.
Yet aside from the eye candy, the most surprising aspect of Crysis is how well the game play stands as a result of these visuals. Crysis offers a rich assortment of play styles and invention from gamers and the architect for much of this is the Nanosuit. The ability to switch into a cloak mode and render the player invisible, allows for intensive stealth play. Switching to super strength though can allow for drastically improved accuracy on your weapons. You have an assortment of assault rifles and all of these can be customised on the fly with laser sights and various scopes for improved aiming. The combination of your suit powers and weapons in such a grand world offers a completely varied game play experience. In the first half of the game you have to sneak into a heavily guarded Korean base to steal a document. Crawling through the jungle to avoid detection using your cloak, you can hide behind houses and barrels and move up to the base. You can use your super strength to leap over the walls, cloak yourself and steal the document. You may then snap on your speed mode and race away to steal a jeep and drive it off into the forest as the guards chase you. Why not dump the car once you've reached the forest and go on foot? There is a river that you can swim down too or you can steal a boat as well. You could redo the mission and climb up a guard tower, throw the soldier out, and sniper enemies from above. Or you could put an explosive charge on a vehicle, drive it into the base, jump out and then detonate it. All of this can happen with such spontaneity and excitement like few others games have allowed before. Those who have labelled the game play of Crysis as generic have not experimented or combined the suit powers nearly enough as there are so many options and pathways in this open world to explore. Whereas games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 offer large quantities of side quests, they sacrifice the same focus and intensity that Crysis providing a focus on a single mission at a time in a massive sandbox world. It is easily the best use of an open world environment in a game so far.
It is thankful that Crysis does have such freedom as many of the objectives in the game are extremely simple. Many of your objectives include stealing a document or uploading a file from a computer. These can be completed with a single press of a button and feel a little underwhelming, so it is thankful that the lead up these objectives is incorporated with such diversity and freedom. It never feels too stale or entirely lacking in depth. There are many moments that we have seen in other games like where you have to shoot down ships or drive a tank to dispatch enemies, but regardless it has never been performed on a scale like this before. It may annoy some gamers – particularly stealth enthusiasts - when the game shifts from its diversity to a single focus on completing a mission. You may have spent a great deal of time planning and sneaking into a base, only to find that because of the scripted nature of the mission, the alarms are going off and you now have no choice but to blow up enemy vehicles with a bazooka. The atmosphere throughout each of these missions is solid but not as entirely obvious as other games, particularly in the horror genre, have provided. You are immersed into this world and made to feel like a solider because of the visuals and the combination with the game play. Switching from armour mode to cloak forces you to move quickly between the foliage and the rest of the jungle, and although some have found it frustrating that the cloak mode only lasts very briefly, it also forces you to slow down, stop altogether or lie prone in waiting as you approach your objective. It is because the foliage looks so realistic in its modelling and because you have to use it as a cover, along with your suit, that you do become a soldier in the game.
It is fortunate that the game play in moments like this provides you with such drama and tension, as the game's story is awful. What seems like a plot taken from the movie Predator and a few moments from the Bond movie Die Another Day, Crysis takes itself very seriously with a lot of gung ho machismo that will have most players rolling their eyes. Much of the dialogue is comprised of expletives and referring to soldiers as 'son' and the only thing we can take from Nomad – whose face we never see – is that he is a can-do man. He is a super soldier and killing machine, capable of piloting aircraft and tanks and taking on the Korean army by himself. The voice acting is equally bad, particularly from Nomad, who sounds as though he has never had a day out of the Army. If Crysis were to become a movie, it would be the sort of thing Jerry Bruckheimer would latch onto. It fits the mould of many of those mega dumb action films like Independence Day and Armageddon. The only redeeming feature of the story is that it is an excuse to take the players to such a beautiful location, and unlike FEAR, it does not get in the way of the action as much, particularly in the first half.
Some have criticised the final third of Crysis for opting for a much more linear and less expansive approach to the game. While it does not offer nearly as much innovation from the player, it feels more diverse rather than disappointing, given that it is a very different change of pace for the game. The Alien cave level in particular is highly linear but it still showcases tremendous atmosphere and an unnerving sense of claustrophobia. It is very frustrating and easy to get lost in this level but it still remains a harrowing and frightful experience. It was necessary to have these linear final levels in order to complete the scripting of the story. Some of the more significant complaints and frustrations of the final stages are the amount of glitches present. Both Crytek and EA Games should have polished this final stage, but rather it is filled with near game breaking glitches, like players clipping and falling straight through floors. It is very disappointing for what is a mostly excellent product. There are a few other niggling problems throughout the game such as faulty menu buttons that are difficult to click on and the game's tendency to start in a minimised window. These are particularly disappointing bugs given the game has seen two patches already.
The AI in the game is also very mixed. The Korean Soldiers have been designed in two modes of guarding and awareness. They will follow their patrol roots, but when the players noise metre reaches a certain level they will taunt you to come out, search for you in groups using hand signals and flush you out with grenades. On the highest difficulty level the dialogue for the soldiers' changes from English to Korean, although this really isn't particularly significant, unless you want to be sworn at in a different dialect. Disappointingly, soldiers will often face into walls, some will ignore the player altogether - even when you run past them - and jeep drivers will sometimes sit in their cars and not move after you've killed the gunner. Yet others, particularly that of the helicopter and boat pilots, have super human vision, allowing them to see the player even when protected by foliage, which is very frustrating sometimes. It would have been so much more enjoyable if guards reacted stronger to the chaos you created too. You can blow up a truck of explosives outside the base of a gate and yet the rest of the encampment will have no idea about this and continue like nothing has happened. The AI needed to be more aware and a lot more work was needed in such a brilliant realised open world.
Crysis is a very demanding game in terms of hardware but there is a rich environment for players who are able to run the game appropriately. While the visuals are magnificent and a pleasure to see, the inventive nature of the game play is impressive too and should ensure that most players will make their way through the 15 hour campaign at least once. There are issues to be found in several aspects of the game, but few of these are serious enough to exploit what is one of the grandest, most beautiful, and inventive titles for the PC.