Cysis has a remarkable presentation, but everything else has been done a million times before.
Pays homage to nearly every science fiction and military blockbuster ever made - The Terminator and Apocalypse Now are huge examples; Multiple paths to objectives; Technically impressive visual design
The Bad:
That same formula has been used a million times before in every book, movie, and game known to man; Game lacks weapon variety; Level design, while relatively open, seems very restrictive during subsequent replays; Level design feels skewed towards only a few of the nanosuit's functions.
Story
What you've got here is your pretty typical epic science fiction faire. From the outset, Crysis makes it a point to tell you that it pulls its creativity from pretty much every military and science fiction film known to man, and by the end of the story you'll get the distinct idea that the game really doesn't care that that's what it does. The jist of it is that you're the outspoken member of an elite American special forces team sent to a small island in the Korean Sea to make sure that the North Koreans don't get their hands on some pretty nasty alien technology. Somewhere along the way, the aliens decide they don't want the North Koreans touching their stuff either and they proceed to not only try and blow the North Koreans off the face of the map, but you as well. In keeping with the summer blockbuster template, the story in Crysis takes very little risks in going deep - what's here is here to keep you in the game. It's all flash and no substance. There's big bad Korean generals, hunky special forces guys who can take a beating from a tank, and slick aliens who zoom around firing ice shards at you like they were rounds from a gatling gun. All of the characters are generally uninteresting and follow your typical blockbuster steretypes. The good guy is the outspoken, wide-eyed spec ops guy turned savior; there's the hot lead female who goes from being damsel in distress to kick butt queen, and so on and so on.
Unfortunately, just like most summer blockbusters - espeically the ones designed as trilogies so that the studio can milk the franchise for all it's worth, Crysis ends just like that. And I mean, "That." The largest chunk of the story comes in the last twenty minutes or so before the final boss fight and once that's over, the story pretty drops off the face of the planet itself in lieu of the fireworks. If you're quick on your toes or playing on one of the first two difficulty settings, the story can take you as little as six hours to shove through.
Gameplay
Like Far Cry before it, Crysis is all about giving the player freedom. Each of the levels in the game is pretty open - with the exception of one or two here or there that are simply Point A to Point B story mission - which gives you a lot of room to do what you need to do...kind of. The game seems to push you towards a few of the nanosuit's different functions. See, in Crysis you have this tricked out multi-million dollar nanosuit that can do things like make you stronger or make you faster. Think of yourself as the Six Million Dollar Man...just without the five years to live bit. The suit can also cloak you and soak up weapons fire (for a limited time, mind you), but in reality the game pushes you more towards using the cloaking ability and the shield ability the most. Even on the easiest difficulty settings, the bad guys are pretty sharp on their toes when you're using speed mode, so nine times out of ten they'll end up pegging you with a few shots regardless of how much you're running around like a chick with its head cut off and the strength mode generally gets you killed before you really have a chance to really do anything.
With that said, it wouldn't be a first-person shooter without things to shoot people with. Crysis delivers your standard material here - you start the game with a pretty average American sub-machine gun/assault rifle hybrid and you'll eventually work your way up to your own hand held version of what the aliens use to shoot at you. Since you can only carry two or three weapons at a time, you'll probably find yourself sticking to a select few of them. Again, this design choice seems to indicate that even though the developers are encouraging freedom, that they're still herding players towards a set path of some sort. Many of the weapons aren't particularly useful so there's really no point in dragging them along. Indeed, the game's difficulty balance feels distinctly geared towards only a few of the weapons in the game, mostly the Korean rifles and the later heavy weapons.
When you're tired of shooting at people with guns, Crysis does contain a select selection of vehicles for you to choose from. There's the humvee that the North Koreans have, there's a boat (which is rather useless except for one certain part of the game), civilian pickup trucks (another pretty useless vehicle), and tanks. Tanks sound cool in theory, but in reality those pesky Koreans tend to shave off most of your damage while you're in one before you can really do anything with it, forcing you to bail in favor of the much more rewarding (and time saving) method of just grabbing a rocket launcher and doing things the easy way.
Much has been said in the way of Crysis artificial intelligence leading up to its release and most of it is pretty justified. It's AI. It's supposed to act like a human being and it does for the most part. It's nothing to write home about, but it's nothing to yell at either.
Presentation
The presentation in Crysis is technically amazing, but it's also technically uninspired. Many of the locations in the game are pretty standard fare for what the developers are trying to accomplish - there's lot of swaying vegetation and bloom-ish lighting effects trying to give you that deep down warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you think about your last (expensive) trip to the Bahamas. There's a whole lot of palm trees and sand here too, but the developers don't really do anything with it. It all feels like it was meant to look pretty rather than genuinely be pretty (PM me if you need an explanation to that). On the other side of the spectrum the ice levels are equally faux-pretty, but uninspired. They're just...white. There's more to snow than white.
Aside from the obvious number crunching going on, the explosions for one look like they don't belong. They just don't...fit. They look off and like they were made long before the rest of the effects were and the developers forgot to go back and revamp those too.
As for the audio, it's pretty average. There's your typical immersing audio track in the way of jungle sounds and gunfire, and then there's your typical voice casting. None of the character acting is really standout...it's all pretty standard over-the-top action flick sounding to me.