Posted: 11/30/07

Lest we forget: don’t judge books by their covers and don’t judge games by their graphics. Well, just their graphics. There’s no denying the tour de force of visual yum-yum that Crysis brings to the table. Graphics gluttons will get their fill, if they can pony up the CPU and GPU cycles to make Crysis play nice. But when you dive beneath the surface is it just as beautiful?

Apparently, US foreign policy is alive and kicking in 2020, with the help of US Army Delta Force soldiers in state of the art nanosuits. You take the role of one of those smooth suit operators, code named Nomad, in a search and rescue mission. Some researchers have been kidnapped by North Korea and are being held on the Lingshan Islands, but nothing seems to be going according to plan.

Crysis ping pongs Nomad around the vast islands through a series of missions and discoveries. Amidst the chaos of the battlefield, little hints drop of something more sinister than garden variety fascism, with unexplained deaths, mysterious ruins, and glimpses of something not entirely human. All of its military bravado meshes well with pressurized sci-fi elements which eventually explode, giving the plot a brief, but blunt bend, before cumulating in a mishmash of the two. Think Predator with a bigger food chain.

Each level in Crysis drops you into a vast, detailed world, where natural boundaries like endless oceans and steep mountainsides mark the fence of a wide playground. This playground is filled with various objectives to keep the plot flowing, but when you cut out the narrative, it really boils down to getting to a specific point and sometimes clearing it of enemies. How you get there and how you dispatch them is up you, with the help of the nanosuit, which gives you the ability to use stealth, speed, shields or strength, giving a myriad of ways to take on any situation.

You can go guns blazing with shields up on the open road or try sneaking up cloaked on a combatant through the jungle, or even use strength and speed to race by soldiers, high jump onto some cliffs and start sniping, or even keep running and bypass them all together on the way to the next checkpoint.

There are occasional areas that may require a more linear play style, but they’re usually directing you to face off against a new threat, try out a new weapon, or position you for a plot shift. There’s also a brief sci-fi interlude midway through the game that is much more straightforward, though more disorienting, as you spend it freed from the confines of gravity. And just when taking on soldiers starts feeling monotonous and close encounters of the third kind wear out their welcome, the two coalesce into a new icy ridge to overcome.

Multiplayer offers standard death match and a new mode called power struggle, where players start with stripped-down nanosuits and a pistol, where frags can be traded for more weapons and suit upgrades, as your team attempts to acquire stronger weapons to take down the enemy base. They’re both fun, and some of the strategy elements in power struggle are neat, but it’s not the next level of online fragging.

The sandy shores of the Lingshan make a great sand box, but how are the pale and shovel? The suit abilities all drain a main power source, leaving you open for a quick death, so strategizing your movements is key. Full shields and a loaded shotgun will let you level a bunch of soldiers, but when you’re up against a full platoon, it can make more sense to switch to speed mode and hightail it to a higher position.

Cloaking slowly whittles down your power when you’re standing still, but start running and it depletes much more quickly, making sure you can’t be lazy when you’re invisible. Strength mode slips in as auxiliary: negating recoil on machine guns, allowing for super high jumps, or letting you save some ammo as you punch a soldier into submission. You’ll have to make use of all the modes to get through the game, though personal favorites will emerge depending on your play style.

There’s no proper way to play Crysis, though some situations may call for more specific stratagems. The counterpart to the suits are the guns and grenades, and even here there’s some personalization, as you adjust various scopes, attachments, and even ammo types so you can kill the way you want to. Vehicles are appropriately placed, and are stocked with various weaponry and viewpoints, but again, if you want to ditch the tank and go for a guerilla assault, well, that choice is yours.

The enemy soldier A.I. is good: flanking, calling for help, and taking cover, while the various difficulty levels change more than hit rate and health, with the highest difficulty setting actually making all soldiers speak only in Korean. A delicate effect, but an example of the great care Crysis was made with.

The game suffocates slightly on its own genre. It’s all about shooting and not getting shot, but it could be so much more. This is hinted at with the wonderfully animated animals, and the variety of shelved items you can pick up and swing about. It’s fun to destroy such a detailed world, we just wish more of this freedom was tied into the actual game.

It’s easy to see that Crysis is meant to be run on computers from the future. At its highest settings it will run at slide show speeds even on the beefiest rigs. Screenshots may look like reality, but if you actually want to play the thing, you’ll have to kick it down several notches, where it goes from being mind blowing to just another great-looking game.

There’s no denying that even running in DirectX 9 at medium quality, the graphics and the physics, from the snow flakes to foliage, are gorgeous, but for everyone who hasn’t spent $5000 on a new PC in the past month it’s not the revolution that was televised. And even slumming around at medium with a beefy machine will see performance dips as the action heats up. In time, Crysis will grow into its engine, but for now it’s just beautiful, not transcendent.

Graphics rarely make or break a game, and it’s the same case with Crysis. The open world design comes together thanks to the functions of the nanosuit, giving the diversity of stealth, assault, and speed to keep the game from growing stagnant. It’s not going revitalize the PC gaming market and force tens of thousands of people to buy $500 video cards, but it’s a unique first-person experience that can only be done on the platform. Crysis manages to transcend the hype to go beyond the pixels and stand solid on its own.



Release Date:
PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Shooter, First-Person
Editors' Choice

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