Crysis

Nanosuits, physics and aliens – oh my! David Hollingworth has a Crysis.

It’s dusk. Clouds scud across the sky as the light begins to fade, highlighting the group of men smoking cigarettes in the shadow of a truck no more than thirty meters away. The truck, and the men around it, are in a small military base protected by earth mounds, guard towers and emplaced machine guns – and you have to get in there and sabotage some equipment...

This is a common mission you’ll be faced with in the early stages of Crysis, the long awaited FPS from Crytek, and the spiritual sequel to Far Cry. Like Far Cry, how you go about the mission is largely up to the player and their preferred style of play; but in Crysis, you have even more options thanks to the near future setting.

The game places you in the hardcore shoes of a spec-forces type with the call sign of Nomad. You’re armed with an assault rifle and pistol to start with, but your biggest asset is your Nano Muscle Suit. It’s no set of MkII MJOLNIR armour, but it’s pretty damn cool – in the game’s opening cut scene it helps you survive a chute failure during a HALO drop onto a South East Asian island. You live, but you do get cut off from your squadmates, which leads into a nicely paced set of encounters and missions that let you learn the limits of your Suit and get used to Crysis’ physics-rich gameplay.



So you might solve the above tactical problem by mounting a silencer and scope on your assault rifle, taking out the guard in the tower and the nearest machine gunner at range, then sneaking in with your Suit set to Stealth mode. You might prefer to switch to your shotgun, set your Suit to Strength mode and make a running leap over the mounds and onto a roof, then start popping anyone in range. Or, our favourite, scope up with a sniper rifle, Stealth, get into the perfect position, then put a round into the truck’s gas tank, blowing it up, killing guards and collapsing nearby towers.

There are also many missions that call for a stealth approach, or for you to take a vehicle from point A to point B – on the up side, failing to do either is not a mission breaker, making for mad dashes on foot through miles of enemy territory after having your boat snag on a rock because it was buffeted out of the water by an air to ground missile. We’re still playing through the single player game, but we’re already looking forward to the replay.

It’s like a giant sandbox made of HE and flimsy plywood, and is a hell of a lot of fun.

But it’s not all wine and barbed wire roses. The one big whinge we have is that for a game with such a powerful toy as the Muscle Suit, why then does every guard in a flak vest seem ten times harder to kill than we are? You’ll pretty much not want to stop firing at someone until you’ve put a whole clip into them, as rounds seem to literally ping off NPC armour until the cows come home. If it were possible to ditch the Suit, and simply wear one of those bullet proof flak vests, we’d do it in a flash. For a game with such excellent AI and a phsyics engine to match, the sense that you’re still playing an old school shoot-em-till-their-HP-is-gone shooter is galling.

But after every annoying fight with three grunts that manages to empty your entire inventory, you can still look around and enjoy what is possibly one of the finest graphical experiences you’ll ever encounter. Volumetric clouds fill a hazy sky that fades down into a horizon that seems as clearly defined as the ground at your feet (which you can see, by the way, a touch we always love in an FPS). Trees and foliage sway in the breeze; the same breeze that ripples the blue water by the island’s shore, and dapled object-sourced shadows flow across te ground and your weaponry. And as has been hyped, it’s not static, either – a large amount of that pretty scenery can be brassed up and blown away, which folds right back into the gameplay.



Of course, the graphical wow comes at a processing price. The minimum specs may seem reasonable, but you really don’t want to bother with Crysis on a single core PC with only 1GB of RAM, let alone one that’s running DX9 on XP. Believe it or not, Crysis is actually the one good reason we’ve come across to upgrade to Windows Vista. Similarly, it’s a good thing that the not-over-priced 8800GT has just hit the streets.

There’s a solid multiplayer game as well, but again, we have some lingering doubts. For one thing, it forces you to link up to other players via GameSpy’s Comrade service, and we don’t like any piece of software which tells us what to do. It’s also light on the maps, and features only two gameplay modes; after the multiplayer joy that is Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, Crysis just seems a little... sparse.

But that aside, everything that makes the campaign game solid is here as well, and going up against an opponent that’s just as clever in using the environment as you are is a real thrill.

Crysis is not perfect, not by a long shot, but few games have inspired the office story-telling and bragging that this game has. And let’s face it – can you ever get tired of blowing shit up? We didn’t think so, not when each explosion is an individual work of destructive art.