Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"All it's cracked up to be"

Crysis is the best looking game ever made. With that single statement all other arguments can be put to rest. Yes, there's an expansion with some slight refinements graphically, but the impact of Crysis was first noted from the beautiful clarity and amount of detail the game pushes out. Granted, you don't need a fantastic system to actually make the game run, but the better your system the better Crysis will look and the better Crysis looks the better it plays. This is a case where style is substance and any other ideas need to be thrown out the window.

You begin Crysis parachuting down from a ship with the rest of your team. Once a shockwave hits all of you the team is split up into five different locations. From there you make your way through the dense North Korean jungles fighting various KPA (Korean People's Army) forces in a very open-ended shooter. Every piece of foliage you touch is brushed aside as you step past it, beaches lead to dirt paths that lead to jungles and these lead to rocky hillsides, which lead to occupied plantations, destroyed schools and cemeteries and more. Crysis is consistent in the look of the North Korean countryside and locales but never lets anything get old.

And then for the final portions of the game the levels take on a different feel, with one frozen locale, another aboard a battleship and a creative level with absolute zero gravity where you simply fly around every corner of the level. The explanation for these other levels is obvious when playing the game. Throughout Crysis you know you aren't alone in the jungle. It has an almost Predator like feel as you stalk your foes knowing full well that a much more dangerous enemy is on the lookout. The story itself centers on rescuing some archaeologists that have discovered something in their excavation site. The game has a very ominous feel even if the direction it goes does become a bit obvious the suspense of combat and what's waiting on the other side never let up.

Crysis has one of the best campaigns in any recent shooter. For the majority of the game you are placed in open-ended situations where you can approach any battle in any way you like or flat out avoid certain encounters if you feel that you won't survive. On top of that you and your team are donning futuristic nanosuits that let you choose your preferred tactic for each encounter. The nanosuit has maximum speed, strength, defense and a cloak ability that also feels very reminiscent of the film Predator. These tactics open up even more options for how you can tackle various objectives. I myself typically went in cloaked and picked off the enemies from a distance but with the strength power you can physically beat an opponent to death with your fists or jump on top of buildings, with Speed you can run into or out of a situation while defense lets you soak in more bullets for drawn out encounters.

Aside from selecting suit abilities you can also customize your weapons on the fly. No matter what kind of weapon you have on hand it can be customized to your tastes in any way. Whether this involves putting a silencer, grenade launcher, scopes, laser pointers and so much more. You can constantly tweak your weapons to suit your tastes for each individual encounter.

The enemies are extremely responsive to your presence and fairly intelligent in combat. Most KPA will send scouts ahead to see what's going on and if you get spotted they will form tactics that will usually have you on the run for cover. Granted however that Crysis is a videogame, so if you kill an enemy and then hide the next KPA will not care to raise an alarm over the fact that there is a dead body. It isn't really a nuisance since the enemies provide quite a nice challenge anyway, but anyone looking for true realism may be a bit disappointed.

In these open-ended sections you can do as you wish. If you want to swim to your destination than swim, if you want to drive a vehicle whether on land or water than drive, if you want to rush through down the road than you have that option, or to sneak in the foliage or to go from rock to rock on the beach. There is no limit to how you can play Crysis and the game offers a great deal of freedom while still guiding you from area to the next to advance the story.

However this freedom does come to an end in the final fourth or fifth of the game as linear level design takes over. This is a slight misstep for Crysis but it only makes up about three hours of the campaign. The linear levels are far from bad since they are designed well and provide a cinematic change in the gameplay. The gunplay takes center stage rather than the actual tactics so don't expect to put your suit powers to much use in these portions. However, where the majority of the game simply involves you alone in a jungle and occasionally meeting up with a few squadmates to further evolve the plans, the second half becomes absolutely bombastic. The presentation of Crysis in these parts blows away just about every other shooter available. The combination of the sterling graphics, booming sound and tough guy dialogue all come together to make for an exciting endgame. However, this is not Crysis' strongest showing and these final few hours feel at best like an imitation of Halo 3 rather than an original game. If the entirety of Crysis were like the finale than the game would be a mere Halo-clone, but as it stands the open-ended nature of the game carries it through as one of the best shooters ever made and the final linear portions just add some serious spice to the presentation, which dwarfs every other shooter available on the market.

Depending on the difficulty Crysis' campaign should take around twelve to fifteen hours to complete if not more. This campaign is one of the best ever made and stands on its own and rightfully so because while Crysis includes a multiplayer component there isn't an active community for it. I did not join a single match because so many of the servers were empty and the ones with people in them had maybe four or so players. This could be a result of the initially daunting design of the Power Struggle mode. Watching the tutorial video included will take about five minutes as the game goes into great detail about building bases, researching alien technology, and more requirements. Meanwhile, traditional multiplayer modes are not included at all with the exception of a free-for-all deathmatch. Admittedly though it may also be that the Crysis multiplayer community has flocked to Crysis Wars, an expanded multiplayer option with over 20 maps and more gameplay modes included with either Crysis Warhead or the compilation of Crysis: Maximum Edition*. Regardless, if you are in search of a multiplayer game than look elsewhere because Crysis' greatest strength lies in the lengthy and epic campaign.

Not to beat a dead horse, but Crysis is the best looking game ever made however to experience it properly you need to have a machine that can run it. It might be easier now what with it a little over two years after the game's initial release, but the fact remains that Crysis as a PC title looks better than any console game I have ever seen including the newer releases that followed after it.

But Crysis doesn't just look good, it also sounds fantastic. Animals scurry past you in the jungle, guns pack a serious punch, and the dialogue is just awesome. The soldiers in Crysis are tough but they sound like normal people that just want to get out of their current situation alive. Hearing Strickland give orders during the final half of the game is just great because he sounds like the kind of person you would talk to over a drink but still manages to kick some ass. That's the thing about Crysis, it never enters the Gears of War or Modern Warfare threshold of dialogue where the characters become mere caricatures of what they are meant to represent. These guys sound like real people that just want to get off of the island and go home. The music plays a nice role throughout the game as well setting up a nice ambience to some of the stealthier moments and some nice pomp during the exciting portions. It's ultimately what you would expect from a videogame soundtrack and not the unique music from something like Halo 3: ODST, but it never disappoints either.

In just about every area you can imagine Crysis shines as an example of how to make a fantastic shooter. But Crysis is also an idea, one that stands as a game that represents the old days when PC games were far more high tech than anything on a console. The missteps within Crysis are few and what Crysis does well it does better than just about anything else available. There should be no doubt by now that this is one of the best games ever produced within the genre and that anything that looks to compete against Crysis will have to make quite the impression.

*Game was played through Crysis: Maximum Edition