Aiming too high, and succeeding!
The game is far more than just the next generation of eye candy though, and introduces several new important game elements. The nano-suit is the most radical one.
Before I played the game I did not like the idea of a nano-suit too much. I thought it would give you an unfair advantage, and make you into a god-like warrior who just need to run and gun everyone to oblivion with ease, without considering tactics to survive. I prefer realistic war simulation to the kind of Rambo-like shoot them up games.
However, I was surprised to see the nano suit in fact adds more strategy elements to the game, not less. It certainly does not give you too much power as it runs out of energy in an instant, so you have to time the usage perfectly for the maximum effect. When turning on cloaking for example, you will use a lot of suit energy when you move around so you can only stay invisible for short time. However, you can stay still at the same point cloaked for very long. This ensures you cannot just run around invisible killing everyone. You have to find cover quickly again after a stealth kill, and recharge your suit. Using your suits power also puts you at risk, as by default the power is used for generating your shield. So, running around invisible will make you more vulnerable if you were to be detected and shot.
It all balances up very well, and you'll find yourself having to use the suit intelligently to survive.
The nano-suit is cool and all, but its obviously the graphics that's the biggest attraction to the game. It scales well, but I cannot see why anyone would want to play Crysis on anything than the max level of details. Although the game has a lot to offer as a pure game, the graphics IS Crysis. Unfortunately, if you have an old system, you may very well find that other games looks better than Crysis on your rig after you turn off all details necessary to run it at a decent framerate. So although everyone talks about how great the game looks in their reviews, as professional game reviewers they most likely have a much more hardcore computer than you. When rating the graphics in Crysis, you basically rate your computers power.
The game also has negative aspects. I'm not impressed by the AI for example. The biggest screwup I found was during the final boss battle, the enemy got stuck in the final boss' structure and finished some of the mission goals for me by shooting it. Also some missions were broken. In a mission piloting an aircraft I was unable to complete the current mission as I left some enemies behind from the last, and had to restart the whole level. I also experienced a few game-crashes, and at times inconsistent framerates. The final boss battle gave me half the framerate as normal for example, making it nearly impossible to finish without adjusting the detail level.
I also feel the designers tried to do too much. They want to make the gameplay varied, but parts of the game is in fact just too weird and not very enjoyable at all. For example the zero-g level, where you are inside the alien ship with no gravity. Basically it feels like an underwater level, with no water. Interesting in a way for the sake of diversity, but the level is long and tedious, forcing you to spend forever trying to find your way out through a maze of alien structures. Also, the section fo the game where you pilot hte aircraft just feels out of place, and not well balanced. I'm not sure if I like the introduction of aliens in the first place either, I enjoyed the first part of the game fighting real human soldiers much more. It's a winning formula, and I wish they would stick to it the whole way.
But in the end, I just wished the game would not end. It's not short, but leaves you wanting more. Which is a good sign... But, the ending in the game definitively opens up for a sequel, so lets hope its not too far away.