....I've also always liked the zero gravity alien level, I thought it was very well executed and the first time I played it the sense of disorientation was near perfect and the environment was very much alien....
I agree. People seem to hate this level, but I thought it was very well-done.
Crysis had such good movement mechanics....better than any other game I had played to that point.....for one thing, you could lean while in any position (crouch or prone).
There were so many little things that they paid attention to that most development studios to that point didn't even care about, like the audio file for footsteps not repeating the exact same sound for every step, and like how the front sights moved in the sight picture when you were strafing.
AI navigation was very good. I remember the first time I noticed an NPC sight me from a shack on the ground while I was on the top of a 2-level building. He ran into the building and came up 2 flights of stairs to get to me. AI still isn't that good in a lot of modern games.
Then there was the fact that Crytek gave you the EXACT same tools used to develop the game their employees were using, along with ALL of the assets, scripts, and flowgraphs used to build the game. I probably spent more time in the SDK than I did playing the game. What other game in 2007 was doing real-time dynamic lighting with an editor you could "drop-in" and play at any point? It was awesome.
There was a lot of things that Crysis
wasn't. It wasn't a deeply emotional or moving story with any kind of character development or great voice acting. As much as I love the game, I'll definitely admit that. It suffered from way too many "grunt" Asian NPC's as well. They had the script behaviors for some really great stuff (like the cloaked suit snipers), but used them far too sparingly.
For what Crysis did have to offer, I still think it's in the top FPS titles I've ever played.