A huge step up from Far Cry, and the funnest shooter I've ever played.
Crysis also has a better sense of purpose and less campy characters like mercenaries and mutants. You're fighting a trained army that is coordinated and determined. The weapons are so much fun to play with, and can be customized with different kinds of scopes and attachments to better suit the various situations you'll be thrown into. You can only carry two at a time (plus some pistols and a rocket launcher) so choose wisely. My favorite combination by far was the SCAR and Precision (sniper) rifle, very powerful and accurate, so naturally the ammunition is very rare.
The game sounds as convincing as is necessary, the music is a little underwhelming. There is a creepy "alien" tune that was out of place and I really appreciated. The characters are better modeled and skinned than even Half-Life 2 and I even feel they were written better; the scripted cinematic sequences are full of movie-level acting and have a sense of urgency that the latest HL2 expansion lacked.
Downsides... you can't "nudge" boats back into the water like in Far Cry, wtf. Sometimes badguys would try to mount a machinegun nest and instead would fly up into the sky, until I shot them down. Grenades need labels so you know what the hell you're throwing. The alien spaceship level is boring as hell and not very scary at all compared to other alien environments in video games. It's too dark to see anything, any way. And the last level of the game is veeeeery slooooow, too much story intervention, not enough combant, then suddenly two very difficult and unfair boss fights in a row.
Oh, and there is no ending.
I guess I should say something about the graphics; I had to run it with everything on low, no anti-aliasing to speak of, just to get a decent frame-rate, and it still looked pretty good. I was having too much fun to notice all the graphical glitches after a while.
Awesome game. It's sooooooooooooo fun to sneak around and hunt guys and find new ways to kill them. Your suit powers let you turn invisible and increase speed/strength etc. on the fly so you feel like a real badass. The story progression is a little confusing but very cool, with one great gameplay moment after another, so the game is even better the second time through because at each loading screen you can pause and say "sweet, this level is awesome."
One of the funnest shooters and best games ever made.