Crysis is a strange title. It looks like an over-hyped tech demo, with absolutely mind-blowing graphics and psychics that seemingly don’t belong in this day and age; but it plays like a great stealth shooter. This may seem over-exaggerated, but you can do absolutely whatever you want to get to your goals, and this is the game’s greatest, most innovative, and definitely most awesome feature. You may think this isn’t important, but when you can come up with fifty different ways to disable a GPS jammer, and do them all, you know you have found a great gaming gem.

Crysis follows the story of Nomad, or Lt. Jake Dunn, in the year 2020. Sent to Lingshang Island, Korea, Nomad and his squad of elites are sent to rescue a captured archeology team. What the team has found could risk the safety of the world; it’s up to you to stop it.

The gameplay is, at a fundamental level, a first person shooter. You can use stealth to avoid shooting and just take a nice, island stroll: or go balls out and do action-movie style slaughterfests with exploding helicopters and everything. It’s all possible to several things. First, it’s the great, and massive, level design. The island is a living breathing thing, and the only thing that makes it hard to traverse is the enemies and your limitations as a character; not the level design. You can get to the highest peaks or the bottom of the water, and this allows all kinds of approaches to the goals given to you in-game. At one point, you have to retrieve a hostage from a heavily guarded complex, surrounded by machine guns, armed personal, beach mines, and the like. I tried several different approaches; quietly eliminating each guard, to blowing up the place with a few well placed grenades and boats. Some techniques work better then others, but that’s not the point. At some points you will not think “What do I HAVE to do?”; you will think “What CAN I do?”. That’s one of the game’s greatest strengths.

The game is again supplemented by a piece of technology on your character’s body; the nano suit. It has several cool abilities; cloaking, increased strength, great speed, and enhanced armor. The abilities are balanced well, and are each only temporarily usable, based on the (rechargeable) power levels of your suit. With only the ability to use one at a time, you can supplement your plans to get to your goals. For example, the sneaking. Cloaking is a major help; get past enemy defense and flank everyone, cloak again, and methodically eliminate every KPA soldier in your way of a hostage. The abilities are also not overpowered; enemies can still hear you while cloaked, you can only do slightly more with extra strength (break open doors, or lift heavier objects), and you can’t exactly zoom from one end of the island to another with max speed. Each ability has its own little great uses that I’ll let you discover yourself, but they become useful and stay useful to the very end.

Each difficulty in the game is different, and not just in a way that “the enemies are stronger! OH NO!”. Actual gameplay changes take place. On the easiest difficulties, your enemies all speak English, are highlighted with awareness levels and can barely shoot to save their lives. On Delta, the hardest difficulty, you don’t have crosshairs, your enemies speak Korean and are actually sometimes able to take too many bullets, a drawback. But this is the way I suggest you play the game on Delta unless you’ve never played an FPS in your life, because it’s the most realistic and fun way to play. Some great moments result from this; such as “Did that Korean soldier just say he saw me, or does he just like that magazine he’s looking at?”. It adds great suspense and it makes surprise attacks (like having a large tree crush you, since a KPA guy just broke it right behind your back), that much more awesome and cinematic.

The game feels like a movie when it comes to the story; great voice acting, and intricate character development flesh out the story over its long length and keep it interesting. When a squadmate dies, you feel genuinely torn up about it, and when you save a key person, you feel admirable. You may think I’m lying, but play the game, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. The story seems a lot like a War of the Worlds or Alien, and it is. Just because it’s an average story doesn’t mean it can’t be good in some ways; the great characters prove this. If you feel like being John McClaine for a bit, but don’t want to play a crappy tie-in game, Crysis may just sorta be your chance.

One of the greatest things about Crysis are its graphics. At the highest settings, and at a good frame rate, the game looks nigh-photo realistic and is a gamer’s dream. The water just looks like you can get wet by getting in it, and the trees wave about in the wind like a dream. Every little brush reacts to you; you can chop down entire trees with a few well placed grenades or bullets. The island can change after a single firefight; a lush tree filled oasis is now a barren, sandy, hole filled wasteland. The little details add greatly as well; motion blur when you run, a lack of focus on the things around you except for what you look at when you use a scope, and the blood on your screen when you are shot. The physics to go along with this are also amazing. You can pick up anything you have the strength to pick up. Feel like killing an enemy with a porn mag? A boat engine? A cup of coffee? Go right ahead; you can do it. A really great example of the physics I saw was when a bunch of KPA (your main enemy in the game) crowd into a small shack. I threw a grenade in the room, and before they could escape the house collapsed inward and everyone got crushed. Pretty sadistic, but it gets the job done. The physics also make great cinematic action. When a mountain in the distance starts to shake and sputter, rocks fall out and crush everything below, and it all looks great too, since it’s all in real time. Now you may think that, looking at the system specs, that this kind of awesome is unattainable; it’s not! Don’t hold back on this because of the frightening specs. On a mid-range PC with a pair of NVIDIA 6800 Ultras in SLI, the game could still hold a semi-decent 20-30 FPS with every feature on high except the shaders. Of course, if you want to see everything at good quality, you should upgrade. 6800s are the absolutely lowest end you can play on, and even then it’s still not perfectly smooth.

The controls for the game are somewhat complicated seeming at first; your Nano Suit has many different changeable functions, weapons can be customized, you have night vision, and the like. It’s all controlled by different buttons, and if you don’t get used to it you may get confused. Luckily, the game gives you a bit of help along the way, and somewhat gradually introduces these features. Luckily, every control can be customized to your liking. More of an arrow-keys kind of guy? Do you want to turn on night vision with the N key? Go ahead! No support for gamepads, but with the breadth of features, who in the world would attempt to distill it all to a gamepad?

The audio is one other great thing that isn’t as heavily touted as the other game’s features. Explosions make the room shake with great tremors, like when a jet plane crashes into the land not to far ahead of you. Gun fire is piercing, and your character gives noticeable audio cues to his pain. The click of an empty gun is a sound you’ll learn to dread, and the shouting of a KPA patrol that has just spotted you will make you panic. The screams of an alien creature will rattle your bones, but boy will you like it. Real 7.1 Surround is going to sound amazing (and I tout it with a 2.1 system!).

This game is far ahead of its time. With a PC like the HP Blackbird 002, a 7.1 Surround system, and a great mouse and keyboard, this game should completely blow your freakin’ mind. Even with me, (for now) just playing on low specs with not too great an audio setup, I gave the game the score you’re about to see. The game is a cinematic PC masterpiece, with absolutely almost no flaws, except that it can’t play on your grandma’s PC and it can sometimes be difficult. The bar really has been raised, as PC Gamer has stated. It’s gone so high now.. can it be beat again? For all gamers out there, let’s hope so.

99% Incredible