Awesome visuals and action-packed, strategic gameplay make Crysis a worthwhile experience.
Now, I have just made my new "Origin" account (as much as I hate EA) due to the fact that EA had been taking their games off Steam. Anyways, it was only $20 and I had just recently upgraded to a shiny new rig. Quite simply, it was the best 20 bucks I have ever spent.
When you first get into the game you find you and your team of U.S. special forces are inside of a plane, getting ready to parachute out onto the fictional Lingshan Islands, where a team of researchers has sent out a distress signal due to the recent KPA (Korean People's Army) invasion of the island. This seems more like your average military shooter, until you realize it is the year 2020 and all of your team are wearing high-tech nanosuits, which are basically organic sets of power armor. This power armor grants you abilities of super strength, speed, and armor, along with a high-tech cloaking device that can render you nearly invisible. However, there's one catch; the severely limited, but quickly regenerative, power supply. It is because of this that you must tactically manage what abilities you use against the massive waves of the KPA. The story mainly revolves around you and your team trying to search for and evacuate the U.S. researchers in open, sandbox-like levels, while also eliminating all KPA you come across and finding any intel you can. Along the way, though, there is another mysterious enemy that you encounter numerous times as you continually fight the KPA forces. Eventually, you find that these strange enemies are, in fact, aliens that have been using the island as a base. The sudden electrical activity that the aliens had created was what attracted both the researchers and the KPA to the Islands (as well as the U.S., who had used the researcher evacuation as a cover, although this remains unbeknownst to the character until the end game).
The main story isn't terribly memorable, however it does help carry the game along quite nicely. But now, we get to the main part: The visuals. I have played many, many games in my lifetime, including Battefield 3 and the very sequel to Crysis itself, Crysis 2. And none of them look quite as incredibly amazing as this game. The fact that it's 5 years old just makes it all the more jaw-dropping. The game has a massive amount of detail and makes amazing use of foliage; trees will sway dynamically based on the direction and speed the wind is going; shooting any part of the tree will cause it to break off, allowing you to pick it up and use it as a weapon; and the awesome textures make everything from the bark to the leaves come to life. Explosions are crisp and colorful, and the game also features tons of details; crabs will rush away in large schools when you approach water, and sea turtles can be found slowly pushing themselves along in the sand. There are also a lot of different birds and fish that can be seen around the environment. It truly does feel like a tropical paradise. In addition to this, the game also has incredibly smooth and realistic animations that actually make it so that people, whether they are friend or foe, are life-like. This is especially helped by the terrific facial animations that put even the awesome Source Engine to shame. Now, you'd think with such awesome visuals that this game must just be all flash; sure, good eye-candy, but abysmal gameplay. But this is terribly wrong.
Believe it or not, Crysis is nearly as fun as it is good-looking. The open sandbox levels allow you to go along at your own leisure, either murdering everyone in sight or just staring and watching a turtle push itself along the shoreline. There are numerous secondary objectives you can choose to either do or not do. And these aren't just for the sake of adding more content; they often come with rewards, such as being able to call in air support or stopping your radar from being jammed. While you can argue that this is really only an illusion of free choice, I still think it makes the game a whole lot better. The game features a lot of vehicles you can use, such as humvees, boats, helicopters, and even a military VTOL. All of these can be used to your advantage when you are decimating the oncoming KPA soldiers. Over the course of the game you acquire upgrades that can be universally used on all your weapons. These upgrades are all applied in real-time in an intuitive weapon menu, so, for example, if you have been spotted by someone and your silencer is no longer useful and now just serves to reduce your damage, you can quickly open up the upgrade menu, take off the silencer, and get back into the fight, all in real-time. The only words that can describe it? Awesome. Fights require a lot of tactical thinking and management of your limited power supply. Simply put, the game is just a whole lot of fun, not to mention the sheer number of ways you can approach any combat situation.
A pretty prominent con of the game is it's obvious lack of optimization. While it is beautiful, I expected it to run a little bit better on a top-of-the-line card released 5 years later, but again, considering this is the ultimate rig killer, I'm fine with that.
Another con was the less-than-stellar AI. While it was good, at times I'd have an enemy not notice that I was standing in front of his face, and other times I'd have an enemy be able to know exactly where I was and have him kill me from 50 yards away, prone, and cloaked. Along with this are your occasional bug or glitch that is standard in almost every game ever released, so not that bad.
In the end, the replayability you can get from the total number of ways you can enter a situation through the single-player campaign, plus the incredible modding community that releases new maps and missions every day, plus awesome mods that allow for even better visuals without decreasing performance make Crysis totally worth the $20. Pick it up today!