Just completed my first ever play through of Crysis, which is just what the doctor ordered after a game like Mirror's Edge.
Absolutely stunning game visually, with solid core mechanics, mediocre AI, forgettable characters, and a fairly ho-hum story that manages to pick up the pace and snowball in the 3rd act.
The gameplay could have stood a bit more balancing: I found myself using **MAXIMUM STEALTH** for almost every encounter with speed really only useful when you just want to run past enemies to get to an objective and strength for when the game requires you jump over something tall or punch a door to keep moving.
The dumb as a post AI didn't help the situation much, allowing me to do hit and run kills in plain sight as the enemies would imediately lose track of me when I cloaked.
Some of the vehicle levels were a bit frustrating as well. If you didn't know what you were doing early in the level, you find yourself 5 minutes in with a Tank that's taken 95% damage with just a brutal slog if you choose to abandon the vehicle and go the distance on foot.
The level design was really on point, however, especially in the earlier sandboxy levels. The level design definitely allowed multiple approaches to an objective while still channelling the player along a defined route. Only one small instance in the game where I got turned around and wasn't sure where to go. I appreciated the more "on rails" approach the later levels took to ratchet up the tension.
Overall I was fairly impressed. Crysis was such a rallying cry for PC Master Race graphics that it's easy to forget that there is actually a remarkably decent game underneath all the "Can it run Crysis" hooplah.
I already own the 3rd Crysis thanks to a voucher I received, so i'm curious if the second and third installments hold up to the first (I also have Warhead, which I will definitely fire up after a break with something else).
Feel like I could use a nice snack of a game next. Definitely not a first person game. Maybe I'll give Shadowrun Returns a shot...