Crysis is the cure for any other crisis you may be experiencing at the moment! Long live Crysis!
Crysis is a FPS game where you play as Nomad who is a secret ops guy that is send to a tropical island to rescue some scientists who have gone missing due to a North Korean invasion. The scientists have located an alien artifact that the NKs want their hands on. The story in Crysis isn't well told and is your standard artifact/aliens kind of story. We have seen this kind of story a thousand times before but to be fair most FPS have equally bad storylines and it does move the narrative forward here.
What sets Crysis apart from other FPS games is the Nano-suit. It's a form of combat suit that lets you become super fast, super strong, invisible, or have super armor. The drawback is that these features drain the suit energy supply and you can only use it in short bursts (except armor that doesn't drain energy). In terms of gameplay what the Nano-suit does is that it lets you choose between vastly different play styles and even better, you are never locked into a specific type. As the story moves on you fight groups of NKs and you can choose to simply use maximum armor and attack them Rambo-style or you can use cloak and take them out silently or you can sneak up on one of them, switch to maximum strength and grab one and throw him against a tree and instantly kill him or throw him against his buddies and knock them all down and then shoot them. You can enter a jeep and simply run over the soldiers or stop the jeep and use the mounted machinegun to gun them down. If an objective tells you to gather intelligence from a small village, then there are a number of ways to do this: Guns blazing, cloak and sneak in to get the info, swim via the shoreline and sneak in from the beach, drive a jeep right into the village, snipe the soldiers from afar and then stroll in and take the info, use maximum speed to use quick in/quick out scenario etc. It's really only your own imagination that limits you in how you approach the situation. This give the game immense replay value.
The AI in Crysis is some of the best ever seen in a FPS. The NKs respond in a very humanlike way to threats and this seems to have confused some players who claim the game is too easy or that the AI is stupid. This is not so – they react as a human would have reacted. If you are in a gunfight with one and you switch to cloak, he will stop shooting due to his surprise of a vanishing enemy, but then he will start to shoot in the general direction you were located before you cloaked. This is very realistic if you ask me. If they spot or hear something they will come check it out and you can distract them by throwing a grenade in another direction, but once they have checked it out and not found anything, they will resume their initial search for the source of the noise. Another cool feature is that if you play on the hardest difficulty, they all speak in Korean and hence you can't use their banter against them like you can when they speak in English. It's little features like that that sets Crysis apart from many other shooters.
Crysis is in some ways a sandbox game and in other ways it is quite linear. The game is objective based and it's important to remember that you are a soldier with a mission and time is of importance. The game sports a big open world but your objectives are located at a specific site but it is up to you how to get there. During the game you will at one point see the aliens in their natural habitat in a zero G environment and the architecture in this place is unlike anything you will ever have seen before. It's so nice to see aliens that aren't just "men in rubber suits" but who are actually looking strange and use technology unknown to man. Once outside again the tropical island will be covered in ice and snow and you are now fighting aliens. These last levels are much more linear than the first part of the game but are still fun.
Another feature worth mentioning about Crysis is the gun modification you can do on the fly. You get the standard supply of guns like assault riffle, submachine gun, sniper riffle, pistol (can be dual-wielded), shotgun etc. But what sets the game apart is that you can modify them with various mods like silencer, sniper scope, iron site, incendiary ammo, sleeping darts, etc. This means that your basic assault riffle can be used in many different ways. You can use it as a kind of sniper riffle by adding a sniper scope and incendiary ammo (packs a bigger punch). But looking through the scope is rather wobbly so you switch on maximum strength and now it's much easier to hit. You can cloak and use sleeping darts to silently take out an NK. There are explosive barrels in the game and they can be used for offense by shooting it one time with a pistol to get the flames going and then quickly pick it up and throw it at an enemy using maximum strength. The physics play a big part of the game also. You may be in a firefight with 3 baddies and you are standing inside a shanty and shooting out when all of a sudden one throws a grenade at you that blows the entire shanty down and you now are vary exposed to enemy fire when just a moment ago you were relatively safe. You always have to think on your feet and react quickly to new threats and that's the greatest part of Crysis.
You can't write a review about Crysis without mentioning the graphics so here it goes: The game sports the absolute best graphics ever seen on a PC – by far! Walking around in the lush jungle is close to photo-realistic quality. The CryEngine can render outside environments with stunning beauty and make things look "realistic". The way trees sway in the wind and cast shadows on the ground or how pretty the sun looks in the morning at sunrise over the ocean is breathtaking (just don't ignore the NKs that are shooting at you). When you are swimming under water and you see bullets make a line of bubbles when they move downwards to the way water runs of your mask when you move onto land again is amazing. But all of this comes a prize: Crysis will pretty much rape your graphics card and bring your CPU into submission! With the latest patch that improves performance, my system (AMD dual-core 6000+, 4 GB RAM, 8800GT) could manage high settings and get about 30 fps. Also it should be noted that I didn't see much difference between DX9 and DX10 but that could just be me.
The only real weakness of Crysis is the last 3rd that is not as good as the first part of the game. Fighting aliens is much more straight forward than fighting North Koreans. The aliens fly around and can see through your cloak and you can't use strength or speed against them. The last level takes place aboard an aircraft carrier and is mostly just A to B stuff but it does have some epic boss battles that are worth it. The only other minor complaint is that vehicles (cars and boats) blow up just by sneezing at them and when they do you instantly die. There is also a short part where you command a VTol that is a flying aircraft of some kind and you are supposed to dogfight the aliens in it and give supporting fire to people on the ground but the controls are horrible so it becomes a very frustrating sequence but fortunately it is really short.
All in all Crysis is a modern masterpiece. It combines fantastic gunplay with amazing graphics and cool looking enemies. The game also conveys the feeling of being a soldier in a super suit that gives you a technological edge over your enemies that have numbers on their side. You must use the technology to survive and hence have to outthink your opponents. The sense of technological superiority but bodily inferiority is what makes Crysis the best game since Half Life 2 and is a game all fans of FPS games should play.