Crysis Reader Review

In a vain attempt to try and miss the woeful English national football team, I decided to finish off Crysis and get a well rounded view on one of the most anticipated games of the decade.

From the makers of Far Cry comes this game which once again appeals to the graphics fanboys as it does to the well rounded gamer, Crysis infamous high spec requirements are well known to most, but surprisingly it looks good on most settings.

I played it on my system with a constant 20-30fps on low to medium settings at 1280x1024 and the only gripes I had with it was the fact that the draw distance of flora and fauna is considerably less than the draw distance of the 'actors' within the game. I'll touch upon this a bit later, but just as a sidenote, I've been playing the Witcher too and that has been set to 1024x768 resolution and medium graphics settings and that is stuttering along at 10-20fps which actually surprised me.

Anyway, onto the game at hand, and I have to say I'm going to annoy a lot of peope with this. Crysis is a very average game with a shiny jacket. In fact i'd go as far to say as this is Far Cry with a Halo jacket on.

The voice of Nomad is very similar to Master Chiefs, you play a masked protagonist in a suit which gives you 'superhuman' abilities, you're expected to do the majority of the fighting by your superiors, theres an alien intervention later on in the game, theres a tank convoy level, each act is preceeded by a letterbox fade in and a title in the bottom corner and there is your escape in a vehicle section to cap it all off. In a game thats being touted as a breath of fresh air, this heavy flavoring from another successful franchise (and one that I have unfortunatly grown tired of) put me off a little throughtout the game.

But enough of that, i'm going to get a load of flak for that as it is. The game itself starts off very disappointing, you feel your abilities don't last long enough and your weapons are next to useless. I know I felt this way for the first few acts of the game, but once you start to get the feel of it, you really start to pull off some superhuman stunts.

To expand on the suit ability point, when you first play, you notice that the speed and cloak abilities run out very fast indeed, but believe me, thats because you are using them wrong. I started out trying to cloak up to an enemy squad before taking them out, but it just doesn't work like that, its more effective if you use the cloak to relocate yourself in a gunfight if you are pinned down. When you start to understand this then you start to get the best out of the game.

The guns were a big disappointment also throughout the game. They never felt accurate enough and I died a fair amount of times throughout the game. Sniping opponents from a distance was generally next to hopeless, mainly because it was highly inaccurate and in lower graphic settings you can see enemies but zoomingin on them caused the shrubbery and world itelms to pop into view in front of them and only the shotgun seemed to be any use when disposing of enemies. Only later in the game when the SMG and laser sight came into play did another gun feel effective, but by then, I was loathe to pick up any other guns because I never had faith with them.

But about halfway through the game, once you start to play around these niggles, this game feels very good. In fact, around the harbour level I took out half the korean military with a mixture of strength jumping, mid air cloaking and a helpful SMG. Whats great also is the fact that with such a big map you are able to tackle objectives in a manner of different ways, I highly doubt that the way I played the game would be the same as the next person. Its not quite sandbox as it still falls into the FPS 'Go here kill/destroy that' objectives, but compared to most corridor based FPS's, this is more of a field based FPS.

Once the aliens are introduced later on though, the game seems to lose its way, it descends into corridor based territory and feels more like a chore rather than a pleasure to play, much in the same ilk that the Flood ruined Halo.

By the end of the game, I was happy to have finished it, but it didn't leave a sense of greatness that I got when finishing Half Life or FEAR, and the intense feeling that the game had been influenced by Halo soured the overall quality.

I'd definately recommend the game to anyone with a passing interest as it is a very well polished game, but anyone expecting a life defining experience will come out greatly disappointed.