The game had promise, but ended far too early before it could reach it's potential.
Like many modern games turned sour, this game, at its core, has a good foundation and creative ideas. I'll always love any hero in a power suit (from Megaman to Freeman), and this game is no exception. Although a bit shallow in character, our hero Nomad is equipped with a unique power suit that not only boosts his base abilities, but features customizable powers that lets you pick an choose which style of gameplay you want to progress through the game as, which was one of the game's biggest highlights for me. You can choose between extra armor for the Counter-Strike method, extra strength if you want to go bowling with the Koreans (not in the traditional way), invisibility if you're a fan of the stealth genre, and extra speed for the infamous and widely used screw-up-and-run-away-screaming-like-a-scared-little-girl tactic. It also features a decent array of weapons which are customizable with different scopes, silencers, and a grenade launcher. So we have a good amount of content, but the execution's where they fail to deliver.
The very gameplay of it feels off and makes Nomad seem more of a rookie than a powersuit-endowed veteran, especially during combat. The way the guns are fired makes aiming strange and it can get frustrating very fast. The suit seems a bit underpowered at times, and overpowered at others. At first I assumed this was on purpose to try to force the player to try out different powersuit modes, but this is where I was further letdown. Each individual mode by itself seems like it was underdeveloped and not thought out very well.
The armor mode by itself seems fine, but you'll quickly realize how difficult the game becomes without it. If you're not constantly in armor mode, you have virtually no defense and are extremely vulnerable against even the weakest weapons.
This is why the strength mode is so hard to pull off. While you can ambush a group of enemies in strength mode and sling a few of them into a nearby tree, you've already used up more than half of your energy, and you're about to die because you weren't using armor mode. So unless you see a single, lone patrol on the beach waiting to get skipped across the water, it's not practical.
The stealth mode was what upset me the most, perhaps because it was what I was most anticipating. While it's expected that invisibility isn't full-proof and you can still be noticed if you move too close near an enemy, the downside is how short a distance you can actually move before it drains your energy. The invisibility mode has a unique draining system where it lasts a good two minutes or so if you're standing still, but you can only move about ten or so meters before you're completely drained, and you find yourself visible in the middle of a group of obscenely racist Koreans with no power for armor mode. Nomad's definitely no Predator, and the only real thing this powersuit mode's good for is if you see a group of Koreans about to walk past you and you want to pretend you're not there.
Speed mode is perhaps the most tolerable mode, but it has the same weakness as the strength mode; you can dash around and cover distances quickly, but you leave your ass wide open, and for how pathetically weak you are without armor mode, this might as well be literally. If that wasn't bad enough, while it doesn't drain energy while you're walking in speed mode, which is about as fast as you can run in default armor mode, it drains your energy completely if you sprint with it in about two or three seconds. This lets you cover about ten or fifteen meters before putting you in a temporary sluggish pace until you recharge your energy reserves. I assume this was designed for the 70% of the game you'll be running away to heal yourself after killing three members of a mob of thirty. And no, before you ask, you cannot dodge bullets and are as easy to hit while running in circles around a group of enemies as you are sitting still in armor mode.
The greatest failure of the different powersuit modes is how they don't transact with each other very well at all, which makes shifting tactics in the middle of battle difficult, if not at times impossible to do. Because of how greatly the speed, strength, and invisibility modes tax your energy reserves, by the time you've actually used any one mode to any useful extent, you'll have insufficient energy to use any other powersuit modes except armor. And because if you get hit one by an attack, your energy recharge halts until you can remain uninjured for about five or more seconds, you're best with sticking with a single mode until you either manage to finish off your targets, or you die.
While this review is already a bit longer than I anticipated, I couldn't submit it without mentioning the terrible physics engine that's out to get you. Yes, you. Crysis is the only game I've played in the twenty-first century where you can survive a barrage of enemy bullets in armor mode, then get killed by getting tapped by a revolving radar dish at the wrong angle. This engine is great for stunning effects which you'll only be able to see if you have the most modern computer, but when it comes to conventional gameplay, it can kill you. That's no metaphor.
In the end, I can't say there wasn't one or two instances in the game where I didn't enjoy the punishment (you read me?), and I have played it twice to date. If you're looking into the game, the only advice I can give you is to not raise your hopes for an unrealistically great game, because this game isn't. But still, this game leaves its mark in terms of creative customization and a compelling story that leaves you asking questions, and perhaps it's the tingly feeling you get from hurling humans into each other with a force that can shatter every bone in their body that makes this game worth it. I hope you enjoy the game even more than this review, and here's hoping for an even better game in Crysis Warhead.