Crysis: North Korea is at it again.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Amazing graphics, great game play, and involving story.

Cons: Alien enemy AI is a little lackluster, steep requirement.

The Bottom Line: 
Greats graphics and game play make this one of the best shooters to date and a bang for your buck.

Author's Review
First of this game is a first person shooter, and it has fairly high system requirements to play it.

Story: The story for Crysis is pretty good; although it’s not completely original it is played out well and keeps you interested throughout the game. The story is set in the year 2020 and you are part of the United States Army Delta Force, sent to an island in the South China Sea, where an American team of archeologists were taken captive by the North Korean Army. As you get there you start to rescue them but end up encountering what they were researching, an old alien site. The story of the game revolves mostly around your team, the archeologists, and their discovery.

Game Play: The game play for this game is pretty amazing, again not completely revolutionary, but done extremely well to be very easy to use.

Nano Muscle Suits that you are equipped with are probably the most important thing, which allow you to do some pretty amazing stuff. First of all you have two primary bars, one for your health, and another for energy which serves a multitude of purposes, both bars will regenerate the health slower than the energy though. The energy serves for the different functions that the suit provides which are: Strength, speed, stealth, defense. For the most part defense is the basic, as it just minimizes the amount of damage you take, and you will take damage to your energy first than when it is temporary down, you will lose health. The other things have very important uses, the strength setting lets you punch people harder, throw things farther, and jump higher. Speed setting let you move very fast, and when you sprint, you move extremely fast. Stealth is probably the most useful because it makes you go almost completely invisible; allowing you to move around and pick up some things, though shooting brings you out of it. The downside is, all of these skills drain energy, stealth does it passively, faster if you are moving though; speed does it if you use sprint, and strength does it when you jump, limiting the amount you can do these things.

Free roam; this is probably my favorite part of the game, it allows you to make a multitude of choices when it comes to completing the in-game missions. For instance rather than there just being one way from point A to point B, there are many, this includes the possibility of limiting the number of people you have to fight, which is key cause its easy to get yourself into extremely bad situations.

Weapons: There are pretty standard use of weapons in this game, ranging from pistol to varieties of assault rifles to chain guns and some others that you get later, most times you won’t be too hard up for ammo unless you get into some really bad situations on harder difficulties cause it could take a lot of bullets to get people down.

Difficulties: There are four different settings; Easy, Normal, Hard, Delta. I played this game on hard, and it was pretty bad in certain places where I spent maybe an hour or more trying to get past, but usually if you play smart it isn’t too bad. The differences are in amount to kill a person, as well in identification of enemies, on easier settings they are surrounded with a like aura, as well they speak English up till the hardest setting, not that I found it that important, though they will give you hints of what they are doing.

Enemy AI: The Koreans AI is very good, and can cause a lot of problems if you are extremely reckless. They will flank you, they will pelt you with grenades if you barricade yourself, and they will call in back up. I have had quite a few times where I pushed a bit to fast, only to be caught by fifteen or twenty on two or three sides; needless to say I got hosed. The aliens AI is a bit less impressive, though it still is fairly decent, and they aren’t easily tricked.

Sound: The sounds are very good in this game, including the voice acting. There isn’t too much swearing but it does happen throughout the game. The voices done by everyone are very nice, and synced up well to the lips in the cut screen, and do help to pull you into the game. The sound effects as well are very well on par, and allow you to get a feel you are there, as well if there is any trouble coming from some direction.

Graphics: A key note, this game does have steep system requirements, however even on my computer I was able to play it (AMD 3400, ATI 800pro, 2gig ram), and though it was on low settings it still looked beautiful to me. The terrain for the beginning of this game is mostly forest area of the island, than going to alien, which I won’t go into to ruin the experience. But the forest area was beautiful, trees, ground, water, and water effects; the attention to detail on all of the area really makes you feel like you are there, as well making you understand how hard it is to fight there; trying to see to shoot through thick brush is hard. The enemies as well act very realistic, if you sneak up on them, they could be smoking, or peeing.

The physics in this game as well are pretty good. There are fair amounts of destructive terrain, including some trees being able to be shot in half, as well debris from ships or other things can kill you if it lands on you.

Requirements:
CPU: 2.8 GHz or faster for XP, 3.2 GHz or faster for Vista
Memory: 1 GB RAM for XP, 1.5 GB RAM for Vista
Hard Drive Space: 12 GB of free space
Graphics Hardware: 256 MB video memory, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT/ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or greater
Sound Hardware DirectX 9.0c compliant card