Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"All it's cracked up to be"

One thing that all videogames try to do is make you feel like you're in the game. Whether it's by using a plastic guitar to make you feel like a rockstar or motion sensing controls that make you feel like you're actually swinging a tennis racket. And Crytek gives you that feeling with the excellent graphics in Crysis.
When the game was first shown to the public, people quickly doubted the graphics the same way they did with the infamous Killzone 2 trailer. People also wondered if the game would actually be a good game beyond the pretty visuals. And the answer for both of those questions is yes. Crysis looks fantastic and plays like a dream with an intriguing story, fun shootouts, and multiplayer that doesn't feel tacked-on.

Crysis puts you in the boots of a United States Special Forces soldier who goes in with his team to rescue an American scientist who has been kidnapped by the North Koreans who are excavating a large, remote island in the Philippine Sea. Just as one of your buddies "Psycho" says, the scientist isn't the only reason you're here. Without spoiling too much, the North Koreans eventually find some alien artifacts that seem to have an infinite power source. And being the evil greedy villains that they are, they try to take all of the energy for themselves. But in result, the aliens get mad and freeze part of the island.

The first thing that you'll notice about Crysis is its great graphics. I will warn you that the game is a system hog. The system I ran the game on was from 2007 and had an Intel Core Duo Processor and an Nvidia 8600 GT graphics card. And even with all this, I could only run the game on medium settings with no anti-aliasing or motion blur. But despite this, the game still looks amazing. As long as you can run the game on medium settings, you'll definitely be impressed. As for the low settings, I wouldn't bother with them unless you're hell-bent on playing this game no matter how bad it looks. I still had a couple hiccups here and there (mainly at scripted parts), but other than that, the game ran fine with a decent framerate. The amount of detail in Crysis is amazing. The palm trees serenely sway in the wind, the sunsets look beautiful, and the faces of your friends and foes are perfectly detailed. The tropical island looks good enough to jump into. That is until the island freezes. The frozen trees, bushes, soldiers, and jeeps look equally amazing. All of your weapons have frost on them, and if you stand in place for too long, your visor starts to freeze up from the low temperatures.

But even when you look beyond the lush graphics, you'll be able to tell that Crysis is in fact, a great game. The gun-play feels solid and realistic. When you look down the iron-sights (or scope), the weapon will realistically sway as you breathe. You can also customize all of your weapons on the fly by pressing the "c" key which quickly lets you attach scopes, grenade (and sleeper dart) launchers, laser pointers, and other little knickknacks that improve the game's myriad selection of weapons. Your characters specialized Nano-Suit is also fun to use. With four special abilities (armor, strength, speed, and cloak), your character is always ready for any given situation.

Even when the single-player adventure ends, there is still plenty of fun to be found in the multiplayer component of Crysis. While the traditional deathmatch mode is fun (known as "instant action" in the game), it's really disappointing to not see a team-deathmatch mode, especially considering how much the game is about good versus evil. But if deathmatch is too vanilla for you, there's the surprisingly deep "Power Struggle" mode which combines the elements of Battlefield and Counter-Strike with the pacing of Halo and Call of Duty. "Power Struggle" is based around teams trying to capture different control points. But what makes "Power Struggle" so unique is that capture points do special things to help out your team. Capturing a barracks building allows players to spawn there, while capturing a factory gives the team access to vehicles. And best of all, capturing an alien crash site gives the team special access to alien weapons and vehicles! And just like Counter-Strike, you earn money ("credits") for completing good actions such as capturing control points and eliminating enemies. You can spend credits on new weapons, gear, and ammo. There are only a few maps to play on mainly consisting of tropical island based locations (not the actual island from the story mode though) as well as a special desert-themed level that shows off the game's excellent engine in a non-tropical setting.

So is there really anything wrong with Crysis? Well, you can say that the story mode is a bit on the short side, especially since there aren't many reasons to replay it. And the high system requirements slightly limit the game's audience to people who have access to a high-end PC. But if you can look beyond those two points, you'll find that Crysis is simply an amazing game. With great graphics as well as great gameplay, any fan of action or FPS games should check this out immediately. And if you've considered upgrading your rig for this game, do it because you won't regret it!