Gaming Signal: REVIEW: Crysis

REVIEW: Crysis

MY RATING:

By now everybody has heard something about Crysis: either about the jaw-dropping visuals (true), the outrageous system requirements (true), or the emergent gameplay (also true.) You've probably read about the impressive AI for your squadmates and enemies, the various vehicles you can pilot and the nonlinear play. These things are also all true. And by now, you're probably wondering how I could have given the game 3 stars. Well...

What you probably haven't heard about Crysis is that the game is short - maybe 8 hours worth in total. I finished the game on medium difficult in about 8 hours of play - and that was extended only because I had to repeat the ending sequence several times to overcome difficulties in game mechanics and outright bugs. I find this annoying - I felt Far Cry was much longer

You probably didn't know that despite its open-ended nature on ways to solve the various missions, the game itself is on a rail - running you through mission after mission advancing the plot. Half-Life is exactly like this so I don't fault the game for it, but it isn't Grand Theft Auto in any way. Which is too bad, because the game definitely has the engine for it.

The best part of game for me is in the jungle, fighting the elite units of the North Korean army. Humans are always more interesting adversaries to me than aliens and this game is no exception. The enemies AI here is some of the best I've played with agents sounding the alarm, with remote units joining in the fight, and an overall sense that you can't just blast your way through most areas without bringing every enemy in the area down on your head. That said, I had plenty of cases where the AI got the enemies stuck on the terrain or attacking me through a wall. No game is perfect. Most of the first half of the game feels like you against small outposts and bases - and is definately the most fun for me. Near the half-way point, you participate in a larger conventional tank battle and that too is a lot of fun.

You might have heard that the game has a section where you battle in zero gravity. It's true, but it is a terrible gimmick and I didn't find it fun. You might have heard that the game has a snow / ice area. That's also true and this is the spot where the game demands the most of your system. It looks great and plays well - but I have to wonder if it was worth the hardware requirements. The jungle environments of the first half of the game are equally impressive and a blast to play.

The game changes dramatically towards the end, switching styles from fighting squads of humans to fighting wave after wave of flying aliens. And in the very end, the game has you fighting a series of boss battles against larger and larger alien craft. It doesn't help that there are bugs here (as of this writing) that makes it impossible to complete sometimes, but the game mechanics themselves change and become lame. I have no idea why they did this when the rest of the game is so good.

My system is an AMD X2 4200 (dual core), 2GB RAM, with dual nVidia 7800GTX graphics cards in SLI and a 24" widescreen Gateway monitor. So far, this rig has handled everything thrown at it - but not Crysis. For the ending sections, I had to turn down all the settings to 'Low' and reduce the resolution to play. It's kind of a bummer, because I feel the game looks worse than Half-Life 2 with those settings yet barely provided 30 fps. I have not played multiplayer yet because I feel I would be at a huge disadvantage with such a low framerate.

My bottom line is - the single player game is short, the game requires a top of the line gaming rig to play. The game starts out very strong but gets weaker as the game goes along. That's why it gets 3 out of 5 from me.

Scott I was able to get 1280x720 with all the advanced settings set to "Very High" with 64bit Crysis and DX10 (Vista) with my system.

AMD X2 4800+ (OC'd to 2.8GHz)
4Gb RAM
Single 8800 GTS 640Mb

Caveat: I had to enable Vsync, which tops me out at 60FPS. But in truth I'm getting about 28 to 30 FPS when the action gets heavy. So leaving Vsync off actually dropped my framerate to only 20 FPS. VSync it is.

Regarding the length of the game, I am playing on "Hard" and its taking a little longer. The AI is very good at that level. Also, running straight to the "green triangle" checkpoints, you bypass a lot of combat. I have found that if you stick to the beaches or the tree lines you see more enemies and progress a little slower.

Fun game though. I might have gone to a 4 out of 5 but I think I may be getting a little more out of the game. I don't mean to offend though. My CPU and GPU are maxed out to rate that extra point though.

Posted by tditto on Monday November 26, 2007 at 11:02 AM