Crysis review (PC)

Here’s an interesting question: which games have redefined your expectations for what a game should contain? Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but when applied specifically to the FPS genre, a number of titles will probably appear in most people’s lists. Doom, for 3D graphics – not the first, but arguably the first to make a big impact. GoldenEye for being the first FPS to really work on a console. Half Life for storytelling, modding and multiplayer, predominantly in the form of Counter Strike. Tribes 2 for introducing excellent vehicular combat, Halo 2 for multiplayer on consoles, Call of Duty for creating an incredibly cinematic experience, Half Life 2 for its use of physics, and Far Cry for advances in enemy AI.

And so we come to Crysis, the poster-child for DirectX 10, and therefore responsible for causing PC gamers to spend horrific amounts of money on hardware upgrades, and for forcing them to adopt Windows Vista at the same time. When looked at this way, Crysis is arguably to the PC what Halo was to the Xbox, and desperately in need of a place on that list.

An important starting place for such consideration is whether the game is actually fun to play. Games which focussed on pushing graphical boundaries in the past turned out to be little more than tech demos – beautifully realised environments with shoddy game play – Unreal II particularly springs to mind. Thankfully Crysis doesn’t fall into this category – it’s a lot more than just a pretty face.

Welcome to the jungle

But the graphics are the obvious place to start, as developer Crytek has delivered the most realistic looking game to date. There are times when the only response is to stop and stare – to marvel at the way the jungle canopy sways in the wind, shadows dance on the ground, or to watch the spray from a waterfall forming a rainbow. This is often a reaction to realising that for the last 15 minutes you haven’t been appreciating it in this way, because it just feels so natural. This is a remarkable achievement because the closer game developers push to photo-realism, the more obvious the flaws become, but somehow Crysis manages to be either real enough or enjoyable enough (or both) to allow these flaws to be overlooked entirely.

In fact, for once I’d say it is well worth spending some time in the graphics menus, tweaking the settings to get the best balance of visuals versus performance. If, like me, you have a less than cutting edge PC, you will probably still find that you can achieve a solid frame rate with most of the options set above those selected as optimal by the game. Shaders, however, are not your friend, and will cause massive performance drops if set too high. Sadly, anti-aliasing cannot be enabled without shaders set at least to high, so many of you will have to do without.

As previously noted though, Crysis is thankfully about more than just the graphics. As you probably know the game takes place on a tropical island, where bad people (Korea, I choose you!) are doing what bad people do, and you have to stop them, along with your special forces buddies. Of course, something goes badly wrong and suddenly there are aliens everywhere. In fact, substitute aliens for mutants, and with only minor tweaking it’s basically the plot of Far Cry, but with one important difference.

Superpowered

That difference is the nanosuit – a futuristic piece or armour which turns its wearing into something approaching a superhero, with the added bonus of providing much better jungle camouflage than Jack Carver’s ridiculous Hawaiian shirt. The nanosuit has four modes – strength, speed, armour and cloak – and through their use and the massive, open environments, Crysis’ levels become individual sandboxes, with the freedom to complete each in more than one way. And unlike many games, Crysis provides all these modes from the first second, an excellent decision by the designers as it is these abilities which elevate the game above many of its contemporaries.

Strength and armour modes allow you to tackle Crysis like a standard shooter (to a certain extent). Armour mode provides more resistance to damage, while strength allows higher jumping, more powerful melee attacks and reduced weapon recoil. It is the epitome of the brute force approach – at full power you will even be able to punch through certain buildings. However, as the enemies are pretty intelligent and well armoured themselves, stealth is a useful tool as well. Cloak mode makes you invisible to enemies (unless they’re standing right in front of you) for a limited period of time, and can be used incredibly effectively to take them out while never being detected.

In fact, the AI is rather too easy to fool with the use of cloak mode. On seeing a corpse, other soldiers will come and stand directly over it, demanding loudly that you show yourself, You Yankee Coward. This means that if you find a decent spot to hide in while your suit recharges, you can take out every enemy in the vicinity without ever being spotted. Of course, shooting in cloak mode instantly discharges the suit, making you visible again, so cover, timing and accuracy are still important, but the tactic still seems a lot more effective than it should be.

Suit You

Cloak is also useful if the enemies ever do locate you – duck behind a tree, enable it and head off in a different direction, and you can shake your pursuers if you get to new cover before the suit discharges. Speed mode is also handy in tight corners, providing the boost to outrun anyone. It’s even faster than vehicles over short distances, and provides a viable and much stealthier alternative when traversing the vast swathes of jungle that make up Crysis’ levels.

These suit powers are also available in the game’s multiplayer modes, which come in two flavours – deathmatch and power struggle. Deathmatch is as you would suspect, albeit with a few more people going for melee kills with the help of strength mode, but power struggle is rather more interesting. It’s a bit like Onslaught in Unreal Tournament 2004 – two teams compete to hold a number of control points, which then provide access to more powerful weapons and vehicles to help with the eventual destruction of the opposition’s base. There’s also a prestige points scheme, where you start with just enough to purchase the most basic weapons, and have to gain more through kills and objective taking. Unfortunately as the games are usually very long, entering a server in the middle of one is a receipt for dying over and over at the hands of better-equipped foes. It’s still well worth a try though, if vast online tactical battles sound more interesting than twitch-fest killing sprees.

Running in the family

However despite all the positives, Crysis still falls foul of the same problem which plagued Far Cry. When fighting against humans, Crysis is enjoyable and well balanced, but once the aliens appear the difficulty ramps up to the point of frustration, although thankfully never reaching the ridiculousness of the last level of Far Cry.

There is also the issue of bugs. For some reason it appears to be standard practice to release PC titles with game-breaking bugs, and patch them later. I encountered a number of bugs on my play through, to varying degrees of seriousness. The worst was a point fairly early in the game when the mission objectives failed to update when they should have, and I had to resort to a walkthrough to figure out what I had to do next. Other than that there were occasional graphical glitches with cut-scenes and the scope on the precision rifle, objects hanging in midair or spinning constantly due to problems with the physics engine, and a level during which I could not switch to one of my guns, and the enemies appeared to have no weapons at all. In a game where so much attention has been paid to the graphics, it really isn’t acceptable to have these kinds of problems with the released code.

In the end, only time will tell whether Crysis ends up on that list of paradigm-shifting games. If it does, I suspect it will be for a seemingly minor detail – the first widespread use of an environment which behaves properly. Tree branches snap and fall under heavy gunfire, undergrowth moves underfoot, even a fair amount of buildings can be completely destroyed. Sadly sales figures to date have been incredibly poor, probably due to a combination of the high number and quality of alternative PC first person shooters on the market, piracy, and the required specs being so high as to put many people off. And this is a shame, because Crysis is definitely a game worth taking a look at.