First Person Carnage

Author's Rating:

Pros: The best graphics ever.  Has every gameplay feature you could want from a shooter.

Cons: Needs good hardware.  Still a little buggy.  Second half not as good as first.

The Bottom Line: 
Just when you thought simple, ignorant storylines created as an excuse to kill bad guys and make grandiose explosions stopped being fun...

Author's Review
Remember the old school action movies like Die Hard, Terminator 2, and Rambo?  They don't make movies like those anymore.  The action directors have diverged into those desperate to hang on to that PG-13 rating, and those going after the gritty realism of gun violence.  Crysis is a throwback to the golden days of the guiltless action movie era full of racist stereotypes, foul language, and heavy doses of American buttkicking.  Only in Crysis you don't have to put up with the stupid one-liners from Sly or Arnold, and in Crysis, you get to control the action hero.  Following the open style of Far Cry, the same game developers (Crytek) have continued the sandbox idea of the first-person shooter and throws you into an insanely violent world of explosions I once thought could only be rendered through CGI by the powers of Hollywood.

I can imagine the Crytek brainstorming sessions that look at every successful first-person shooter made and their gimmicks.  Crytek has basically decided to spice up every one of those gimmicks with better technology and include them in Crysis.  There is not actually a lot of true innovation or intrigue in Crysis; it just does more than any first-person shooter before it, and it does everything bigger and (usually) better.  In terms of gameplay, Crysis leaves nothing more to be desired.  You can spend days completing the single-player campaign; you can go online to duel it out in two multiplayer modes that support up to 32 players; you can climb into cars, boats, tanks, and planes; you can grab North Koreans by the neck and throw them into oblivion, or you can snipe them, explode them, and even run over them; you will fight in the jungle, on the beach, in the mines, on aircraft carriers, and of course, in the mandatory alien vessel.  The sun will rise; the sun will set; it will snow; it will rain.  Crysis simply does everything and manages to keep the package cohesive with a derivative story and one identifiable gadget.

Every good video game has to have a signature, and despite all the different offerings of Crysis, its nanosuit makes the game its own.  One can argue Crysis borrows heavily from a true pioneer in first-person shooters, Half-Life, and that the nanosuit is a rip-off of Half-Life's HEV suit; but the nanosuit is just so much cooler.  Not only does the nanosuit protect you with its armor mode, but it also lets you switch to three other modes: strength, speed, and cloak.  First-person shooters tend to feel unrealistic because you are one person taking bullets like spit wads, killing hundreds if not thousands of enemies before the game's ending.  Crysis seems a little more plausible as you are not superhuman, but you do have a super nanosuit that lets you do extraordinary things.  The suit is actually based on things the U.S. military is researching right now.

The story for Crysis is very familiar: scientists have excavated something alien and the commies (North Koreans this time) want to use the alien power for evil.  You must stop the North Koreans first, and then the aliens second.  Although there are many cutscenes and dialogue to propel the plot, the story for Crysis is basically a simplistic, unintelligent military fantasy.  At best, the depiction of North Koreans is culturally insensitive; at worst, it is offensive to all Asians.  What's interesting is that the game offers four difficulty settings and only in the hardest setting do the Koreans speak Korean.  In the three easier settings, the Koreans speak "very bad Engrish."  If you can overlook the cultural insensitivity, the North Koreans provide some comic relief and are actually the most endearing characters in a game full of humorless characters that won't command any emotional investment.

Crysis invests in thrills.  What the game lacks in plot and character development, it makes up for in ka-booms.  The early game settings are open environments laced with various North Korean command centers, bases, and fortifications.  To advance in the game, you must infiltrate various locations, but how you do this is up to you.  There are vehicles with machine gun turrets if you want to be loud, and there is plenty of cover and the option to become invisible momentarily with your nanosuit if you want to be stealthy.  You can even load non-lethal tranquilizer darts into your rifle if you want to be extra covert and humanitarian, although this tactic could've been designed to be more practical.  Eventually, you will have to engage the enemy and at times you will be outnumbered 10 or 15 to one by intelligent enemies that function as a squad to hunt you down.

The combat in Crysis is very real.  Even with your nanosuit armor, you cannot survive getting shot repeatedly.  Just advancing on your enemies with guns ablaze is not an option.  If you do decide to make a lot of noise when infiltrating a base with vehicles, missile launchers, and frag grenades, you inevitably have to find cover and turn on cloak mode.  While enemies cannot see you when you're cloaked, they will tend to lob grenades into your last known location.  Even with your nanosuit armor, you cannot survive even one grenade.  So the general tactic in Crysis is to kill, cloak, and run while cloaked.  But running in cloak quickly drains your nanosuit's energy and takes you out of cloak.  You can fire at enemies with silenced rifles in cloak mode and this usually confuses your enemies, but silenced weapons quickly lose stopping power over longer distances.  On the other hand, not using a silencer gives you an extended lethal range, but your position is given away.  Once enemies know where you are, some will come straight at you, but some will travel under cover and try to flank you.  If a couple of Koreans have their crosshairs on your back, its game over because the first couple of hits drain your suit's energy, and then you can't cloak.  So the gunfights are full of complexity, and it is about as close to real combat as first-person shooters have gotten.  You need to find the right balance of stealth and force, and patience and cunning are a must for you to survive.

Crysis is at its most glorious in its first half.  You fight on one of the Philippine islands and the graphics are incredible.  You need a powerful video card to handle Crysis - an nVidia or ATI card with 1GB of video memory is recommended.  More than ten years ago, Unreal blew me away with its humongous outdoor areas and dazzling skies, and I thought no other video game would have that effect on me again with its graphics.  Crysis fills the huge outdoor areas with countless details impossible to render previously, but where the game blew me away is with its volumetric lighting and water effects.  Crysis is one of the first games I've played where night turns into day during a level, and it occurred to me this feature wasn't in previous shooters because it's hard to do a sunrise justice.  Crysis features a real sunrise, casting long shadows across the landscape and creating glare through the canopy.  Never has the line between computer graphics and photorealism been as blurred as in Crysis.

While the first half of Crysis is a beautiful killing playground where you are free to roam, explore an exquisitely detailed world, and conjure creative and efficient ways to wipe out every last Korean guarding a compound, the game takes a bad turn when aliens enter the picture.  Just to remind those who remember some classic shooter history, nobody liked the world of Xen in Half-Life.  Crysis seems so content on borrowing ideas from successful shooters that it even uses their unfortunate ideas that prevented them from attaining perfection.  You enter an alien structure in Crysis and it suffers from the same problems as Xen: the place is dizzying, it's easy to get lost, and the combat is uninspiring.  What was an open-ended, sandbox environment suddenly becomes tight and cramped.  The entire gameplay from the moment you enter the spaceship becomes more linear and contrived.  Also, whereas in the first half of Crysis, some of the big bang features like tank battles and calling in airstrikes are devilishly fun, the carnage in the second half crosses the line from fun to simply insane.

Crysis simply tries a little too much at the end.  But with so many things to do, some people may disagree with me and enjoy the variety.  However, with every feature except perhaps Max Payne's bullet-time, bugs are inevitable and Crysis suffers from a few.  There are a couple of levels where you can potentially get stuck forever because the next mission objective doesn't get uploaded to your character, or (even more frustratingly) your ride out never shows up.  What's really bad is that Crytek's patches do not address these bugs.  However, if Crytek was banking on the fact that the fun-factor in replaying the levels would ameliorate having to repeat certain parts of the game due to bugs, Crytek would be right.  In the first half, Crysis could potentially be played an infinite number of times and each time would be a different experience because the variables in your tactics and the enemy AI are so numerous.  In the second half, Crysis lacks freedom, but you are rewarded with incredible explosions.  If you love a movie with big special effects, the last level in Crysis is certain to make your jaw drop.

Crysis includes a very good multiplayer to add to the game's durability.  The online game is like Counterstrike on drugs.  While there is a deathmatch mode that's every man for himself, the more interesting mode is the team-oriented "Power Struggle" mode that pits Americans against North Koreans.  To win the power struggle, you must nuke the other team's base.  Trust me, it even funner than it sounds with your nanosuit's hyper-sprinting and cloaking abilities.  The multiplayer mode also features additional weapons and vehicles you don't get to use in the single-player game, such as a freeze ray and an assault helicopter.

With so much stuff to do in Crysis, the easier question to answer is "What can't you do?"  You can't get bored.  Crysis is as fun as Arnold Schwarzenegger with a minigun, and you get to direct the adventure.  Unfortunately you need a very good system with an especially good video card to play Crysis, and the game has its bugs and problems.  But, with a powerful machine, the two positives are overwhelming: standard-setting graphics that are still, over two years after its release, the benchmark for hardware testing; and an endless variety in the gameplay that will make Crysis worth playing for as long as it has to take for you to move on to the next shooter.