Reassuringly for those with delicate tastes, Crysis is three games rolled in one, each with it's own unique physics system and rule set, arranged into a traditional sci-fi storyline of investigation, disaster and resistance. The second of those sees the island around an alien landing site, hotly contested by US Delta and North Korean Army forces, frozen solid in a split second. The surprise: by the time it all happens you've seen the spacecraft interior already. The reveal: breathtaking, as you'd imagine.
How busy a set-piece it will be is unclear - Crytek is only now populating the level and wants its biggest enemies kept close to its chest. But evidently the entire game will be transformed. Incursion will turn to retreat, the deform-heavy environment will simply shatter, and the North Koreans, with their fragile limbs and dependence on gravity, will make way for aliens with better exoskeletons than yours.
Snow is falling, then, in myriad sizes and directions, while banks of volumetric fog buffet your concave visor and thicken in the mountain's pits and troughs. And you're running, eyes looking forwards to the treacherous rocks and back to the alien advance. There's a story section - one of many to exploit the gaps between fights - and at the glazed wall of the sphere is your escape route: a broken bridge and a transitional load.
As Crysis evolves from here, VTOL aircraft and helicopters will be flown, gravity boots will be worn and one by one the legacies of Far Cry will be stripped away in the name of progress. But like Far Cry and Far Cry alone, a lot happens before you take your first step. Crytek likes a game in which you think rather than react, and thanks to Crysis' nanosuit there are planty of options. Both mouse and keyboard can navigate the suit's petal menu, which manages upgrades to armour, speed, strength and stealth (also known as cloak). And keyboard navigation is as fast as you'd hope, fingers tripped up only by the need to cycle through the options for your modular rifle. The inevitable nana-energy bar is there to stop you bunny-hopping through levels with impunity, armour providing a default mode that could see you through the entire game should the need for authenticy grab you.
And that's the deal with Crysis: you go into it without knowing quite what to expect, and come out knowing that you don't have to expect anything. If you want Halo, with its run-and-thwack combat and close encounters, then you can forget the nanosuit and hop in the nearest jeep, a finger reserved soley for the melee key. For Crackdown kicks, you just vault a hundred feet into a crowd of soldiers and become a whirlwind of airborne bodies. For Metal Gear Solid, creep to within breathing distance of the outermost gaurd and grab his throat with a camouflaged hand, using him as a human flak jacket if it all goes wrong. A (for once) genuine FPS sandbox, Crysis feels like play where other games feel like work.
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