My mini-review:
The first thing you notice about this game is obviously the visuals, and with good reason; the previews back in March/April showed visuals that asbolutely blew away anything that had ever been seen in a videogame before. While the actual finished product may not look quite as good as those early previews seemed to indicate, this is, bar none, the best looking game I have ever played. Sure, it brings my system to its knees, which is not easy to do: C2D at 3 GHz, 8800GTX, 2 GB RAM, Audigy 2 ZS, Raptor HDD, etc. But this game looks so absolutely phenomenal with eye-candy enabled that I'm willing to forego high framerates for jaw dropping visuals (1920x1080 all settings on high gets roughly 25 fps on average). The way the water moves, the light beams that move through water or foliage, buildings that collapse on top of you, forests you can shoot down, and some of the best explosion effects ever... this game is visually stunning.
Once you get past the graphics, which I admit, I haven't fully, one must ask if the game is any good. And I would say the answer is a resounding "yes." The game is linear, but the wide open areas keep it from having that "on rails" feeling that plagues other FPSes (particularly games that rely heavily on corridors like F.E.A.R. or Doom). The story is engaging, though if you were bothered by the supernatural elements of Far-Cry (the Trigen), prepare for more of the same. The supportnig cast does fine, although they seem to exist primarily to up the body count. It's hard to feel any remorse at their passing, since you are with them so infrequently. Perhaps if your collaboration with your team had played a more central role, I could see how they could play a better part in a cohesive story and generate some emotion. But this would ruin the nature of the game, a one man army show where you can singlehandedly defeat entire bases of people.
The addition of the nanosuit seems gimmicky at first, but the usefulness of the functions is soon appreciated. The game forces you to use the suit at certain points, which is not clever so much as annoying (oh look, a giant wall is blocking my path, guess I'll have to strong jump up), but figuring out how to infiltrate a base and neutralize the guards using the powers of the suit offers a key gameplay upgrade over Far-Cry. And let's be quite clear, this game plays a whole hell of a lot like Far-Cry. But given how well that title played, that's certainly not a complaint.
The game is not without its share of problems. Many of the enemies seem to have unnatural levels of health. On the easiest difficulty setting, Korean army soldiers can take over ten rounds to go down. That's a bit ludicrous. Fortunately, thanks to buggy AI, they aren't too difficult to take down. Don't get me wrong; the AI seems, on the whole, to be very, very good; they use coordinated tactics, they will move to flank you, and if you use your cloak, they will continue investigating and firing at the position they last saw you. But the AI will occasionally run into walls, run directly at you without firing, or seem to see you through walls. They also don't climb ladders, so raining grenades down from a sniper's nest is one of the more effective tactics against swarms of enemies. There are some graphical glitches, though most are probably caused by my own refusal to tone down the settings, as I want to enjoy the full graphical splendor this game has to offer (without DirectX 10, that's impossible, but I can't imagine much they could have done to improve it). The faults of this game are actually not as bad as the faults of the initial Far-Cry release; that game took several patches to get to full working condition. I imagine the same will be true of Crysis.
Does Crysis live up to the hype? Well, that's a difficult question. On the one hand, you had developers showing screenshots like
this and telling us we could get those visuals out of our computers. Turns out, that was a somewhat "optimistic" prediction (maybe you can with an absolutely top of the line system at about 2 fps, but not under playable settings). Then again, the developers did deliver the best graphics available today, so it's hard to fault them for that. The bottom line is if you liked Far-Cry, you will like Crysis. If not, you probably won't. Since Crysis was hyped as "Far-Cry 2" by myriads of people, myself included, I think it absolutely has lived up to the hype. Crytek has proven themselves once again with a visually stunning, exciting FPS.
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