A technological marvel which lacks in all but the technical aspects. *Warning: Review contains some spoil
So, being a huge FPS fan, I couldnt help but feel disappointed when I first played Far Cry. Sure it was beautiful, and still is, but darn if its story and characters were a bundle of clichés... Retired marine: check. Spy hottie: check. Megalomaniac scientist: check. Ugly creeps: check. Everything was your run-of-the-mill "guy takes over world" B Movie-esque plot bad movies got us used to. Also, the EXTREMELY punishing difficulty was a downside, even more so when you couldnt see anything from the lush and beautifully rendered vegetation (remember? on easy one trigen could knock you off on two hits... armor or not. And thats on easy difficulty...)
So, when I saw the trailers for Crysis and some of the previews, i got quite worked up. The fact that you were a TRUE spec ops soldier, with a kick ass suit and a real enemy, made the story seem much more plausible.
Again, I got disappointed. But lets start from the beginning.
You are Nomad, a member of the special Delta Force sent in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of an excavation team in an island located on the Pacific. You parachute in, but things start to go awry since one of your squad members, whose parachute got tangled on a tree, is found ripped to shreds... along the Koreans, whoa re the ones responsible for the hostile military presence on the island. From then on, you'll start to unravel a story that covers a bit more than lost archeologists...
Evidently, the story is weak. The koreans are just a mere cannon fodder for you to hone your trigger before moving on to the (get this) aliens. Hence, it feels like the first half of the game has no relevance whatsoever, and the second half has a repetitive pace that ends with a terrible cliffhanger.
The aliens themselves lack tons of originality. They look exactly like those weird sea monkey baddies that appeared on the first Unreal, and the ship environs are your typical biomechanic stuff we've seen to death on The Matrix. Oh, yes, speaking about The Matrix, all the robots the alien use are practically rip offs from the Sentinels. The alien ship level is a painful exercise on zero grav maneuvering, which makes the game more cumbersome than it should.
I heard this game allowed you to have a lot of freedom as to where to go and which path to take to accomplish a mission, but thats only partly true. While you can take off-road walks, you'll usually end up in a road, with the korean patrol which will summon reinforcements. Then you'll say "What the hell" and jump guns blazin', courtesy of your all-mighty suit. Yes, you might be able to sometimes stealth successfully, but that will have more to do with your suit's cloak mode than with the level design. Unlike Far Cry, where you could take a boat and give the island a total run-around, you cant venture more than 500 meters off shore before you get a destroyer shell up your suit, thus hampering any "no showdown" approximations to any problem.
However, on the technical side, yes, this game is perfect. The water is extremely realistic (though the Source engine still beats it by a bit), and the physics system is top-notch, allowing you to break EVERYTHING. The sound is nice, though sometimes it feels phony (the robot sounds are just hilarious). The vegetation needs special mention. I can't describe it as anything else but perfect. The shadowing, the character modeling... all these aspects are simply some of the best. (Again, comparing with Source: the facial expressions do fall a bit short, as the lip-sync. Why so much comparing? Well, Source set high standards on character design... and havent been outmatched). Some levels are fantastic (the carrier... ooooh the carrier) while most are just... nice. Islands, no matter how lushly rendered, do get old. And while the ice trick is neat, it will bring your system to its knees, courtesy of ice refraction. Which leads to the other quirk. This game totally needs a MONSTER rig. Otherwise, get ready to lower down some details seriously.
Also, the Artificial Intelligence use on the Koreans is simply superb. They flank, they cover, they lob grenades, they call reinforcements, etc. They are way tougher than aliens... Aliens just swim REAL fast on their zero grav, making them REAL hard to hit... theres where their difficulty lies. And the robots, well, they just charge at you.
The suit characteristics are fantastic, but you cant help feeling they should have been better balanced. The suit has four modes: Maximum Armor (self-explanatory) Maximum Strength, which allows you to jump higher and punch real hard, Maximum Speed, which allows you to run faster,but sprint is useless cuz it drains energy FAST and cloak, which is great, as long as you dont move too much. Needless to say, youll spend the game on Maximum Armor, because any other setting will get you killed faster than a cockroach on a 5 star restaurant. There is a self regenerating health system, which is much appreciated, given the toughness of enemy soldiers.
And thats it... A fantastic technological demo, but not much of a game. It could have exploited more its resources, or bring us a more coherent story, but it was not meant to be. Thanks, but Im gonna keep HL2.