(andPOP) - Crysis is a game based on an alien invasion and conflict with an advanced North Korean military in the year 2020. You are sent to an exotic island with a Delta Force squad to find a missing science team involved in a mysterious archeological dig. The island is over-run with North Korean forces but don't worry, you aren?t going in alone or ill equipped. You are armed with the latest weaponry and a super hi-tech nano-suit which gives you added powers.
Game Play
Crysis immerses you in huge environments indoor and outdoor where you can see for miles and miles. You have almost unlimited freedom to go anywhere you wish.
You may go into the levels and tackle your challenges all guns blazing or choose to sneak around stealthily or perhaps you wish to create a diversion to temporarily get the enemies attention.
The game-play is amazing, you can take different paths to accomplish your mission and go exploring for different weapons and ammo along the way. Everything is interactive in Crysis, you can pick up and throw any object from crabs and sea turtles to all sorts of weapons. You may even shoot down the trees with your bullets and watch them fall and roll. The physics are incredible and extremely realistic.
There are many ways to travel in Crysis. Try hiding in the ocean and literally swimming around enemy forces or better yet, why not take one of their fancy boats? It has a nice machine gun. If you find a truck in the area, try taking it for a spin. The Hummer with the mounted machine gun is also available. Try a free test drive and take it near an area of enemies then switch to the turret position and start blasting away.
There are a good variety of weapons which are customizable. Try and mount different attachments and tactical enhancements to your weapons such as laser pointers, scopes and reflex sights. As you progress you find some other nice treats like a laser guided rocket launcher and alien energy weaponry.
Your advanced nano-suit will aid you in you traveling. Turn on speed mode to walk and run real fast and dodge enemy fire. Strength mode allows you to pick up very large objects and throw them and will give you a super jump to make those hard to reach places a piece of cake. Armor mode will help you take some serious damage from enemy fire by absorbing the impact. Cloak mode is the most fun. You can sneak around enemies and take them out one by one using your silencer attachment. Watch them scramble all confused as they attempt to locate you. You can perform other tactics in cloak mode such sneaking up and igniting gasoline drums or gas tanks which create some very awesome explosions to divert the enemy?s attention.
Artificial intelligence is really well done. Controlling enemies and squads as they attempt to surround and flank you making an interesting survival experience. I personally recommend playing the game on a hard difficulty setting to intensify the realism. It makes the experience more enjoyable and the single player story last much longer.
Later levels get more intense throughout the game. As you roar through a raging tank battle you see an alien structure emerging high up in a mountain as boulders and debris tumble down to the landscape.
Eventually you find yourself going through the alien structure in zero G's navigating and fighting alien species, which really twists the game play around.
Graphics
The graphics will not disappoint you as everything in the world is detailed to the extreme. You can see leafs on the trees to each individual blade of grass. Shadows are also produced very well from plants and vegetation. All the textures are detailed and you can see nicks and cracks in almost every object of the game. Walking right up to most objects at close range shows no distortion of texture quality.
Some surreal environments like the alien space craft look like something straight out of the movie Aliens or some kind of high budget hollywood movie. At times you really wonder if this is a movie or a video game. This game is an absolute technical masterpiece which can only be experienced on a high-end PC.
Multi-Player
Multi player mode is one of the more unique experiences in Crysis especially with a mode called power struggle. Here you will play on a team of 16 players against another group of16. In order to destroy the enemy's base, you must construct exotic weaponry, which requires you to hold specific key power plants on the map. You can also capture other buildings such as factories to manufacture vehicles. Capture a bunker and you can spawn in different positions throughout the map. Take counter strike and a bit of battlefield then factor in the nano-suit and you have Crysis multiplayer.
Hardware
If you want to run the game at full blast, forget it! Running this game with a GeForce 8800 Ultra on a Core 2 Duo E6700 with 4Gigs of good OCZ memory will not run the game smoothly at extreme resolutions with Anti-Aliasing. Turn down the settings and the game will play fine and besides, it still looks much better then any other game out there.
This game is a truly a next generation game almost ahead of its time. Crytek claims that you will be able to unlock more graphical features for the next generation of video cards to follow. Hopefully there will be some moderate improvements with the current generation of video cards through game patches and driver updates.
Conclusion
This is simply the best first person shooter made to date. If you can afford the recommend hardware and want to push its capabilities to the max, Crysis is your game. Crysis has raised the bar for all new FPS games to follow.
Graphics: 5.0 / 5.0
Gameplay 5.0 / 5.0
Sound 5.0 / 5.0
Replay value 4.5 / 5.0
