Crysis is a revolutionary shooter that exemplifies the true essence of the term "next gen"
The game has you play as Nomad, a member of a military squad sent by the U.S. to investigate happenings around a Dr. Rosenthal in a remote tropical island in 2019 South-East Asia. Rosenthal is a captive of the North Korean People's Army, and it's your job to find out what they're up to and provide recon. You jump out of the plane only to have your chute malfunction, with no spare or reserve. Luckily for you, Nomad and his four squad mates are clad with the nanosuit, a magnum opus of sorts developed by the U.S. Military for use of its elite forces. With it, Nomad can switch between superhuman strength, superhuman speed, increased armour, and the ability to cloak himself from enemy eyes. The suit's armour capability has cushioned your fall, leaving you ready and able to carry out your mission to find the doc and gather info. Getting to him, unsurprisingly, will have you treading in hostile North Korean territory and running into some nasty surprises – such is the initial premise of the game.
The beauty of Crysis, despite what others might think is its graphical capability, lies in its revolutionary approach to shooter gameplay. The game takes the traditional first-person shooter mechanics and unshackles them from boundaries of any sort by making sandboxes out of every stage. If in past shooters you would have to take a specific path with a specific number of obstacles and an unending supply of enemies, Crysis has come to herald the future of shooter games by giving the player huge if not complete control over the solution to the problems on the battlefield. You are given objectives and venues; the rest is up to you, your suit, and your guns. Explosives, ammo, weapons, weapon attachments, vehicles, and other tools are scattered about the place for you to scavenge for and combine. The amount of freedom you are given to approach a solution is staggering. If you want to sneak in using your suit's cloak capability, you may do so from the left, the right, the flank, or wherever you wish. If you fancy a Rambo-esque skirmish, you may indulge however you want and from wherever you want. If you want to take your enemies out from afar, you may use a scoped rifle while crouched on a nondescript hill or rock formation. If you are spotted and need to make a quick escape, you may quickly switch to the suit's speed to run fast and strength to jump high. Because of the plethora of options you are given, it's nigh impossible to trivialize a mission into a problem with a single solution, and every approach you take is a thrilling experience that will test your ability to react and adapt to the situation quickly and resourcefully. It's this theme of "Adapt, Engage, Survive", coupled with the dynamic nanosuit, that truly makes the game a fresh, innovative, realistic experience that will have you thinking and shooting for quite possibly the first time in a shooter
This innovative style of gameplay is not without great AI opponents. The North Korean sentries you will encounter have apparently been doing some training in their hermit homeland, because they can and will find ways to outdo you. They can flank, retreat, call for reinforcements, take cover etc. Though sometimes glitchy, the AI poses a fair amount of challenge that makes owning them with your nanosuit all the more gratifying.
The only hint of linearity in the game is the fact that it has a definite plot, which is by no means a bad thing. Having a definite plot and setting helps make the game less intimidating than a completely open world shooter like Far Cry 2. Crysis has the classic, almost cliché story of soldiers going to a mysterious locale to save someone, only to find out that they're in deeper trouble than they signed up for. It unfolds slowly for the first few hours, but a little more through and the plot picks up and turns the game into a cinematic experience as well as an action game. The story is strong in its own right, especially considering it belongs to a genre that focuses on cinematic awe rather than engaging plot. The characters are underdeveloped but still believable, and the dialogue is crude but never corny. In the end, however, it still pales in comparison to the likes of Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto IV, whose story and characters are developed fully and expressed flawlessly.
This game's popularity, or should I say infamy, has never rested on its gameplay or story. Rather, it has earned a reputation for its graphical capability and system requirements. Since this is a PC-exclusive game, developers have always boasted that it can only be fully appreciated on the PC platform. True enough, Crysis has the ability to shock and awe its players with graphics that arguably surpass any game on other platforms. Every nook and cranny of the game world blurs the line between visiting a volatile tropical island and staring down a monitor. To this day, more than a year after its release, Crysis (along with younger brother Crysis: Warhead) remains the holy grail of PC gaming graphics, and is constantly used to compare the capacities of top-notch video cards. For its sheer beauty, however, Crysis has paid the price of consumer-friendliness. The aforementioned infamy is rooted in the fact that the game has steep system requirements, meaning not everyone can run it, and a lesser few can run it in decent settings. Though still playable on a regular gaming PC, it's very hard to appreciate without the latest (and probably most expensive) video card in the market. The game's towering demands can do a lot to turn off prospective buyers, which is a tragic loss for both developers and players.
Sound-wise, Crysis does a highly satisfactory job of immersing its players. The voice-overs are great, the atmospherics are beautiful, and background music is well-placed. The gun sounds are sharp and add a little oomph in each burst of the rifle or shot of the pistol. Explosion sounds are also nice to hear, especially if they're anywhere near your opponents. In the continuing spirit of realism, the sounds are more focussed towards setting a realistic atmosphere about the game, rather than making a bombastic orchestra of kabooms and kablams. Although the sounds may not be the first thing one would come to appreciate about Crysis, they are definitely great and worthy of note.
In terms of longevity, Crysis' only asset is the very replayable single-player story. Its gameplay mechanics will almost force you to play again, since you would want to try other ways of finishing a mission, and pick out which is the most gratifying. If you had at first lacked the guts to do anything but sneak in cloak mode, you might want to play again with more confidence in the fact that you can outgun the enemy. You might find another path to take along the way, too. Given the infinite amount of ways to approach the objective, playing through the game over and over will spark any action junkie's fancy, making the game a treasure to go back to and dig up any time.
Regrettably, the huge potential of the nanosuit functions in a multiplayer theatre was not tapped into. The game's multiplayer is moot, having few features and little fun factor. You have only to choose between a free-for-all game mode and "Power Struggle" which is essentially capture the flag with two bases; each "flag" provides weapons and vehicles, some of which can be used to destroy the enemy base to win the game. Free-for-all will have you picking up weapons and explosives on the fly much like traditional shooters. In Power Struggle, you have to buy your gear with points earned through killing enemies and achieving objectives. In addition to this limited ability to customize your guns and gear, the game also feels very slow-paced because of oversized maps and slow moving speed. If it couldn't get any worse, killing another player doesn't give the same graphical recognition and gratification that Call of Duty 4 did. In fact, everything that Call of Duty 4's multiplayer did right, Crysis' did wrong. It's an absolute tragedy that Crysis didn't put out with its multiplayer, since the idea of 32 or so nanosuits in a single map is really very appealing.
Ultimately, Crysis is a game that breaks some barriers in the gaming industry, but leaves others untouched. Its outstanding open world gameplay should serve as the definitive signal for developers to wake up and innovate towards a generation of thinking gamers. The graphics, needless to repeat, are simply unmatched in all aspects and all platforms. The sounds are awesome in their own right, completing the realism and immersion that was spurred on by the game's graphics. The game's story, however, is no different in quality from the stories that we've come to expect from shooters, and its flawed multiplayer detracts from an otherwise perfect game. Overall, Crysis manages to be a benchmark and must-own among shooters that will hopefully lead a revolution of games that are deeper and more worthy of the term "next-gen".