When talking about Crysis with other people I find the best way to convey the sheer excellence of the game is to tell them that it let’s you be both the Predator and Arnold Schwarzenegger, from that wonderful '80s action flick we all know and love. It’s a comparison that’s popping up a lot and is fast becoming worn out, but it encapsulates in a single sentence a huge chunk of the appeal and inherent fun of Crysis. More on that in a moment, but first I need to dispense with the formalities. Crysis has been developed by those talented Germany-based guys at Crytek, the folks who several years ago dropped a very pretty bombshell on the gaming community called Far Cry. Those who played Far Cry loved it for its awesome beauty and lush tropical locales, while simultaneously hating it for having some of the most underwhelming ending levels and bad guys to pop up in a shooter. It was gorgeous, technically excellent, but flawed.
Crysis is nothing like Far Cry. It too takes place on an island, and there the similarities pretty much end. Playing Crysis makes Far Cry feel like a mere dry run, a technical test bed from which Crytek have now done something amazing. You’re placed in the shoes of a US Special Forces soldier, dropped together with your team onto an island illegally occupied by those nasty North Koreans (Crysis takes place not twenty years from now). A science team on the island have dug up something strange and the Koreans want a piece. The US doesn’t want to risk a full scale conflict, and that’s why you’ve been brought in. They’ve also been thoughtful enough to gift you and your team mates with a nano-suit that not only makes you nearly bullet proof (bullet resistant, certainly), but can grant super strength, speed and an impressive cloak for a short time too.
It’s all an impressive set up, played out before you with the kind of production values and writing that puts you immediately in mind of a Hollywood blockbuster. The sheer scale of the locations and their detail is mind blowing at first, and I found myself stopping to just stare at some of the visuals for minutes at a time. You can’t quite process everything and stay focused on the mission at hand. Look at the screenshots accompanying this review (some are my own) and indeed all the others bouncing around the Net – Crysis really does look like this, and even if you haven’t got a true beast of a gaming rig (which I don’t, incidentally) there’s no real loss of visual impact by dropping some of the settings down a notch. Crank everything up however and it’ll eat your graphics card for breakfast. Crysis has got all that Next-Gen sorcery we’ve been promised, but at a serious performance cost.
The nano-suit is not some silly gimmick, but rather a way of opening up the full range of tactical possibilities that Crysis’s levels present to the player. The marrying of the sprawling island locations to a suit feature that gives you super powers turns the early portions of the game into a surreal playground as you experiment with your abilities and pit them against a plentiful supply of identikit armed Koreans. It’s glorious, and is certainly the most fun I’ve had in a shooter in a long while. Early on in the game you have a loose set of objectives, with tremendous freedom in how you go about achieving them. Do you go to town on every group of enemies you come across, or stick to the jungle and take a more stealthy approach? Crysis is able to accommodate and reward varying styles of play. The suit cloak is near perfect, and judicious use can turn parts of the game into an amazingly tense stealth shooter, while the strength mode lets you fling boxes, bodies and anything else to hand anywhere you please. Anything not tied down is a potential weapon, including the live chickens that seem to be everywhere.
Combat against more than a couple of foes is a tough affair, your suit’s armour mode only being able to stop a couple of direct hits (and draining your entire suit power reservoir in the process, annoyingly). Mixing up the various suit powers is the key; using the cloak to get the drop on your enemies, maximum strength to leap over obstacles or claim some high ground quickly and maximum speed to scarper if things go a bit pear-shaped. In a clever innovation, depending on the difficulty level the game will limit things like how many enemies are allowed fire at you at any one time, and on the harder modes the enemies will even communicate to each other in their native Korean, as opposed to the “Engrish” you hear in the easy modes.
For the first few acts, where you battle the North Koreans in an ever-escalating series of conflicts (and watch fellow special forces chaps get snatched by mysterious flying squid beasts), Crysis is a staggeringly awesome, freeform combat experience that never feels like it’s funnelling you from one objective to the next. But, as the game progresses and you stumble upon the (spoiler!) big alien reveal (okay, not really a spoiler), the pace picks up dramatically and your freedom of choice is whittled down considerably. Compared to the earlier parts of the game it feels like you’ve been firmly bolted onto rails, and fired headlong at the endgame. The alien foes, while suitably weird and interesting to fight, never engender the same kind of feeling of fun the same way that hordes of hapless Koreans did.
It feels paradoxical in way. Crysis displays so much invention and integrates everything so well that it never drops below being excellent, but the patent lack of imagination evident in parts of the design bring the rest down. Crysis actually does go steadily downhill from about two thirds of the way in – it’s just lucky it started things off at the top of the scale. It starts with a triumphant, understated bang that takes a few hours of solid play to fully sink in and pulls up short with a boss battle so formulaic it could have been drawn from any mediocre shooter of the last ten years. Clearly a set up for Crysis Part Zwei, the finale leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that burns all the more after the stellar quality of the preceding action and adventure.
But I’m still going to tell you to buy it, because despite the faults Crysis remains one of the greatest shooters ever made. It has an unparalleled level of graphical sophistication, a finely honed combat experience and a sense of scale and scope I haven’t felt since Half-Life 2. It lets itself down to a certain extent, but never enough to truly tarnish what is so great about it. To play it is to stand aghast at the kind of technological trickery the games industry is now capable of, and to revel at being able to punch another man clean through a shed!
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