Mini-Review: Crysis

I've been anticipating Crysis since Geoff posted screens and tech demos over a year ago. I loved Far Cry and have played it through at least 4 times, even going to the extent of randomly running around the maps for the purposes of nothing more than exploration. There is so much expanse to the maps.

Crysis is the same in that regard. I finished it and can't wait to play it again.

For starters, as is the trend in FPS games lately, the game is short. It took me about 10 hours start to finish, playing on normal difficulty. I didn't skip any of the secondary missions at all, but I did follow them pretty much straight through without stopping to smell the Korean roses.

There were several instances where I just flat out ran out of bullets, and had no choice but to run ahead hoping to find fewer bad guys. I spent a lot of time in vehicles using their guns. It seemed that I was pretty safe in the cabin of one of the large 6 wheel trucks.

One of the cool things that makes this game super realistic is that when the windshield of a vehicle gets shot out, it spiderweb cracks and suddenly you can't see out of it any longer. On the one hand, it's cool, but it also becomes annoying the instant it happens. I prefer to stay in 1st person mode during my 1st person shooters, but vehicles was one area where I really had no choice but to hit F1 and step out of the truck. It was the only way I could survive some of the onslaughts. That said, there are plenty of trucks to steal, they all have a huge cache of bullets, and a couple even have missles.

The visuals of this game are absolutely stunning, the character animations are top notch as is the voice acting. They really stepped it up over Far Cry. In fact, my only complaint about Far Cry was the weakness of the dialogue and some of the voice actors. The cutscenes were plentiful and beautifully done in most cases to both shock and awe you, without removing you from the gameplay.

Everything Far Cry did, Crysis does better, graphically and interactively. I am surprised to say that when they talked about night and day cycles in the tech demos, it was one of those things where I originally thought "whatever, like we're going to have time to notice the sun going down". But I was floored at how spectactular the effect is in terms of immersion. There are times when I was fighting and suddenly when the smoke died down I noticed that my shadow was really long, and I looked around, and it was dusk, nearing sunset. But when I started the firefight it was clearly daytime.

Water, fire, and explosions in this game are by far the best I've ever seen. They really nailed it, a lot of the effects in the game are movie cinematic quality, and they're happening right around you.

I didn't take anywhere near enough time playing with the destructive environments, but I did enjoy that for the first time in a video game, I didn't have a 4 ton vehicle get stopped by a sapling growing in the woods. Most trees could be either knocked down or shot down, to clear a path if you wanted to drive there. And a couple times I got a tree caught in the undercarriage of the truck I was driving and had to hoof it, very realistically.

Unfortunately this environment led to some interesting bugs. There were times when I tried to run over something and the truck just blew up. And there were times when I tried to just walk near items and got crushed by them, because they had been knocked apart and the physics engine didn't know what to do with them. There were a couple times when I was in stealth mode and snuck up on a jeep driver, and when he tried to get out of the jeep he'd get caught in it and get crushed. Once, the jeep actually flipped over as he got out and smashed him. That was odd to watch. Even with bugs though, overall it was a fair trade. The added realism and immersion brought into the game with this technology is amazing. I even laughed out loud when the spare tire of the truck I was driving got shot and popped.

The only other bugs I dealt with in this game were related to game saves and cutscenes. I'm not sure if it was my PC or just some glitches, but there were a couple spots where the save game data would get an error and certain enemies wouldn't die, the body would just hang in the last state it was in, as if it were supposed to die, but the death cycle wouldn't start, so there would be a stationary ragdoll model just sitting there preventing the game from continuing. I had to re-load previous save games to beat that bug. Sometimes in the cutscenes the video would go out of sync with the audio pretty bad, like the video would hang but the audio would continue on. This was only corrected when the next character talked, then the audio would sync back up. The only other bug I encountered was that once or twice my mission goal arrow on the compass disappeared, and I had no clue where to go, so I just randomly explored the map looking for enemies, which would then indicate I was going the right direction. There is one part of the game where this is clearly intentional, but during other parts it's annoying. None of it kept me from passing checkpoints eventually though.

Some other amazing things the game got right: health and armor. There is no health or armor to collect during the game. They regenerate automatically in the forms of health and suit power, so as long as you don't die you can hide and recharge, and it doesn't take forever either. So stealth missions where you sneak around cloaked are not out of the question.

The nanosuit is another neat innovation that really simplifies gameplay while making it better and challenging at the same time. It basically uses its energy to perform one of 4 functions: Armor, Speed, Strength, and Stealth. I will say this now: ENABLE THE NANOSUIT SHORTCUTS. There is a little menu to set your nanosuit functions, where you hit a button and then just drag the mouse in the direction of the function you want, but it's far easier to enable the shortcuts. What the shortcuts do is set the suit function with a double tap of a key you already use. Double tapping prone will send you into stealth mode. Double tapping melee or jump will put you into strength mode. Double tapping sprint will put you in speed mode. I never did figure out what to double tap to go back to armor mode, I used the suit menu for that. Strength mode allows you to jump really high, and also allows you to grab enemies and chuck them into each other for kills. It's pretty cool.

The only other advice I can give you is PICK UP WEAPONS. It is a little annoying that you have to manually retrieve every single gun for more ammo, but it adds some realism. You don't just get to run over a gun and get the bullets.

The game dialogue is R rated, it swears a lot which adds to the whole 'military action' theme it has going on. There was even a point where I was supposed to train my binoculars on a target for an airstrike, and I was too close. So the pilot radioed to me to "back away from the target and get some cover, you fuckin' moron" or something to that effect. The F word was in there, that I remember. I laughed.

Well, that's about all I can say about the game without getting into spoilers, so in conclusion, Even though it's short and sweet, I highly recommend this game. It was a lot of fun and very immersive.