After many years of waiting, console gamers can play Crysis. It's worth the time and money, but it's not revolutionary.
Well, the wait is over. The original game's disappointing sales on the PC, largely due to rampant piracy, led Crytek to rethink their attitude toward consoles. This rapprochement has led to a bounty for us. CryEngine 3 was developed with the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in mind, and the studio has now brought both Crysis and Crysis 2 to the consoles. The former's single-player campaign is available for only $20 on PSN, while the latter is a full stand-alone release. (It seems Warhead's arrival is both imminent and inevitable, no?) But the sad truth may be that this game cannot live up to the mammoth expectations attached to it, much less the myth that has grown up around its technical excellence.
Don't get me wrong-for a game that came out in 2007, Crysis looks astonishingly good. I also suppose that I'm not getting Crysis' "true" or "full" brilliance, since CryEngine 3 is arguably a downgrade, rather than an upgrade, from CryEngine 2. Nonetheless, it remains impressive: massive open-world environments without any loading after the initial wait; interactive, destructible environments; lovingly rendered weapons and explosions; and some of the best lighting effects in the business.
However, at times one can't help the feeling that this game is style in search of substance. The most glaring problem with this game is the canned narrative. You play a member of an elite special forces squad (sound familiar?) that has been dispatched to a Pacific island to search for a lost research team. Before its disappearance, the research team had stumbled upon some ancient ruins that did not appear human in origin. Shortly thereafter, the North Korean military invaded the island, and it's up to you to figure out what happened to the team, and what the North Koreans are after. It's not quite as bad as Killzone 2, but it fails to capture the imagination, and feels like a re-tread of lots of 90s action/science fiction franchises (particularly Independence Day or Michael Crichton's Sphere, though with considerably less humor and verve). And the aliens, when revealed, are not particularly interesting-they are not a complex empire of intelligent beings meant to be understood, they are just flying enemies you have to blast down. Compared to the original Halo, this is a flat world, lacking in mystery.
Yet Halo may be this title's closest comparable when it comes to the meat and bones: gameplay and design. In fact, this game could almost entirely be encapsulated as Halo with a twist. The legacy of Halo can be seen in the player-character's rechargeable health, limited weapons loadout (two main weapons, such as rifles or shotguns, a pistol, grenades, and one special weapon slot for a rocket launcher), and even the early level design. Most of the initial stages take place across spacious outdoor areas that resemble your prowling grounds in Halo's finest levels and give you some choice in how to complete your objectives. Love grenades? Blow the encampment to smithereens and then clear out any remaining foes. Enjoy stealth gaming? Sneak into the base undetected and take out guards one by one. Or be a long-range sniper, or a guns-blazing action hero. The pace of these levels feels eerily like Halo as you traverse gorgeous landscapes to complete stated objectives without an abundance of scripted events. Thus, a single level can last roughly an hour or so, almost inconceivable in the Call of Duty design model, where levels tend to be discrete, breathless, high-energy encounters where you never stop moving as fast as possible to complete a few objectives in a 15-20 minute time span.
The twist from the traditional Halo formula comes from the special powers endowed by your nanosuit. The suit enables you to armor, to cloak, to move faster, and to be stronger (higher jumps, more powerful throws of enemies). The use of these varied abilities is fairly obvious: use cloak/stealth mode to sneak in close and dispatch enemies, or to evade their fire when you are retreating; armor for your close combat encounters; speed to cover more distance or run away, etc. You can pull off a few great combos, such as when you cloak to get behind a guard, use your strength to choke him out and then toss him to the side, and then armor up before revealing yourself to the remaining enemies and gunning them down. Overall, the nanosuit abilities add a new wrinkle to the very tried-and-true Halo gameplay.
Crysis even features a Halo-like change of pace in the middle, where you go from fighting one type of enemy to another. And, arguably like Halo itself, this change is not for the better. Levels in the second half become more scripted, your enemies are not actually more interesting to fight, and the final sequence involves immense bosses that feel like they're ripped straight from Halo (particularly a large, four-limbed walker that shoots an energy beam out of a head-like pod at the front).
The campaign is mostly well-done, has a substantial length for a modern shooter (around 8-10 hours, even with an unpopular level from the original PC version removed), and has a few great moments. But the gameplay is not without its flaws, the most glaring of which is the artificial intelligence. The enemy behavior here is somewhat rudimentary compared to other modern games, as the enemies have a fairly tightly circumscribed range of motion. That is, they will chase you out to the edge of their village, but they won't pursue you any further. You can pretty much clear out all villages by running in, killing a few at a time, then running out to recharge health and pick up new ammunition. Repeat ad nauseum. Also, I find that Crysis (and its close relation, the Far Cry series) tends to favor long-distance gameplay. I don't mind it, as I actually love sniper rifles in shooting games, but it's something to note. In this respect, it diverges most from its contemporary brethren, such as Halo or Call of Duty, which favor more frenetic, close-quarters combat.
The strange thing about playing Crysis is that, based on its hype, this game has always been idealized as an entirely singular, unprecedented experience. Yet when we finally slip into it, it actually feels like something we've played before. And unfortunately, despite all the polish and the tightly executed gunplay, it's something that's decidedly less remarkable the tenth time around.