Review: Crysis
Crysis, is a very open ended first person shooter from Crytek, the developers of FarCry (for crying out loud, what's with all the crying?). The game takes place in a near future setting, wherein the main character, Nomad, and his troop of super soldiers--equiped with high-tech body-enhancing Nano-suits--assault a Korean controlled island in order to rescue US hostages. Or so they are told. Upon reaching the island it becomes very obvious that something... else... is on the island. That something else being a long dormant species of advanced alien life that predates man.
While the story line leaves something to be desired, the open ended game play is what players are really interested in anyway, and it does most of the impressing. The jungle environment in Crysis is simply amazing, no game ever made can touch the "world" of Crysis. It's miraculous. A gift from the gaming gods. Trees, rivers, the ocean, birds, the sun, wildlife, rain, the glow of the moon and stars at night, it's all so retardedly life like. You have to see it to believe it. It all just looks so damned amazing I can hardly keep from peeing my pants like a little bitch.
Of course, this does mean that the game is a bit taxing on the system, so you need a pretty good gaming rig to run it. My overclocked cpu/gpu rig with a GeForce 8800GTX, 4GB of ram and an Intel Q6600 ran the game in 1680x1050 with "medium" settings across the board, save three or four select settings on "very high", such as water and blurring effects. The game recommended "very high" for me for all settings, but that caused me to run at about 20 fps... which isn't acceptable. Nonetheless, everything looked fantastic with the settings I chose.
While playing, I ran around to various points on the map, completing random objectives such as "blow up X turret, explode Y enemy base, rescue Z hostage", etc. The objectives and why I was doing them didn't really concern me, what was cool was that I could complete said objectives in any way I wanted, with almost infinite creativity. All of this creativity is enhanced by the fact that even your character has different facets of customization, via the nano-suit that he is wearing.
Review: Crysis
Strength mode + throwing enemies into walls = ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION!The suit has four main modes: Maximum Strength, Maximum Speed, Maximum Stealth, and Maximum Defense (the default mode). Defensive mode makes bullets hurt alot less (you'll be using this mode the most), Strength mode allows you to leap extremely high into the air, or punch large metal objects with the force of a behemoth, Speed mode causes you to run at about 100mph when sprinting, which is fast enough for you to run over a land mine and into safety before it explodes, and Stealth mode makes you invisible, predator style. Using the different modes in conjunction with each other is one of the best parts of the game.
You can, say, go into Stealth mode, sneak up on some guy, grab him by the throat, activate Strength mode, and then hurl the bastard at two of his buddies with such force that it kills all three of them, and also knocks down the old shack/hut that they are standing in front of, causing it to topple over with physics effect goodness all over. As I said, the game is wonderfully open ended and you can kill and maim enemies using the awesome powers of your super suit in more ways than you would have ever imagined. Hooray!
The developers went to great lengths to make sure that just about anything a player could think to do, they could do on the Island, and it shows. The whole experience is made about 10x cooler by the fact that foliage and undergrowth covers every inch of the island. If you're in the middle of a fight with 3 guys and all of you are spraying machine gun fire every which way, trees, bushes, even wild animals, will all feel the wrath of your bullets. Palm trees topple over and crash down into the ground, killing any enemies that are under them, wild birds run by and fall over dead from stray bullets, and if things get too hot for you to handle, you can always hide in the bushes. You can literally always hide in the bushes, it's fantastic.
You know when you're playing a game, and you try to sneak up on someone, but it doesn't really work because the ground is "flat" and the grass is just a texture, so they can totally see you just laying there? Not so in Crysis. There is just SHIT EVERYWHERE. Bushes, weeds, foliage, whatever. You name it, it's on the ground for you to crawl in. And the enemy AI is fantastic in that if you are crawling around and doing a good job of hiding yourself, they actually won't see you. If they do see you, they will run to where they saw you at, call over their buddies, and start doing a sweeping walk through the grass to try to find you. The AI is really great. They even throw grenades in your general location, and then wait for you to run out and start shooting when you do. It's all very well done.
In fact, it's so well done that I actually required a long period of adjustment before I could even play the game decently. I was so used to every other shooter, where I could just run out in the open and blast away at everything to my hearts content, that I found myself getting owned in the face repeatedly by Crysis's AI. It took my brain a long time to process "oh hey, they ACTUALLY can't see me if I hide in the bushes, just like in real life". It really is just THAT much more realistic.
Now, with all this ranting and raving about how fantastic Crysis is, you'd think that I'd be about to tell you that this was the best FPS ever and that I wanted to suck off the developers and/or have their children. I would love to tell you that. Sadly, I cannot. As awesome as everything that I just told you is, the AI, the graphics, the open-endedness, it all sadly gets thrown in the fucking toilet about 60% into the game. And it's a shame, but I can honestly say that after beating Crysis, I have not been this fucking irritated with a game in a long, long time.
The whole alien sub plot seems really cool, until you stop fighting Koreans and start fighting aliens. The aliens do not have the amazing and real AI that the Koreans do. They have the most in your face overthetop unnecessarily difficult programming that you could possibly imagine. They don't take cover, they don't fire from protected positions, they don't go about their business and allow you to stealthily kill them. They see you, and then just fucking run right at you with light speed and punch you in the face, then before you can react, they run reaaallly far away extremely quickly, so you can't easily shoot them, and then they run back at you and punch you in the face again. The first two or three times I killed one, it was something of a rush because it was so challenging-- then I found out that I would be fighting 3, 4, 5, even 6 of these bastards AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME. OVER. AND OVER. AND OVER AGAIN. It's incredibly irritating.
Oh, did I mention that you have to do all of that in ZERO GRAVITY? Yeah. Your first encounters with the aliens are inside their "base" of sorts. For some reason, the developers thought it would be cool if there was zero gravity inside the base. I don't know why. Every time you fire your weapon, you fly backwards. Every time an alien hits you, it zips around to your back side, and you have to fling and twirl around not knowing which way is up or down, and just when you finally get the alien in your cross hairs, it zips away. Fucking annoying.
Review: Crysis
While you can actually grab aliens like this, it's very difficult to do so, since they move around so quickly and randomly.The end of the game also totally abandons the open-ended gameplay. You leave the jungle and fight indoors or on ships, in very linear point A point B style, and it just seems extremely boring after the sand-box style play that you grow used to for the first half of the game. On top of that, the linear points of "getting to the next area" are a fucking BITCH to find. The whole alien ship/base is STILL in zero gravity, and everything has bright orange or bright blue lights all over it, and its a huge pain in the ass just to try to figure out where the "exit" is so you can get to the next area. I would spend 10 or 15 minutes trying to kill 3 of the alien whores, and then after I finally killed them, it could take me anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes just to figure out how to get out of the damned room so I could go into the next room FILLED WITH
MORE FUCKING ANNOYING ALIENS and a HARD TO FIND EXIT. I have never wanted a game to end so badly in my entire life.
I'm not going to spoil anything about the last boss battles in terms of story, but those were a let down too. Mostly because I died about 500 times because there were 10 to 20 aliens flying around in a VERY small area, all beating the shit out of me because I had NO cover at ALL. Just imagine trying to kill a boss with 10 of those AGGRO ON SITE aliens beating the piss out of you while you try to do it. You can't kill the aliens because if you focus on them the boss will kill you, and you can't kill the boss because the aliens are ripping you a new one while you focus on it. I eventually beat it, but it was a fucking pain in the ass and probably the FARTHEST thing from enjoyable that I could ever want in a game. It was about as fun as trying to beat the last levels of Super Mario Brothers or Contra with only one life left.
So, to conclude, the first half or so of Crysis is spectacular and fantastic, but the whole game goes in a totally crappy direction thereafter. PC-Gamer gave this game a 98%, that's the same score that they gave Half Life 2. I've gotta say, that's bullshit. I'd say it's that the first half is a high 90%, but the horrible 3 hours or so of the Alien levels that I had to suffer through make me want to give it a -30%. Highly recommended for the first part of the game, beware the ending. You may want to kill yourself after playing it.
