November 18th, 2007

Crysis

Crysis has become a “legend” for the fans who wanted to get to see a video game that beats a movie in terms of visual quality and reality rendering. The developers of the CryEngine 2 (namely, the Crytek Company), have managed to bring unprecedented visual reality and quality and this is not just a phrase you can hear or read when describing any new game. This is one of the first games that actually bring true HD gaming to a new level, and, if played on a proper system, the player will really think she/he plays a role in an action movie.
Crysis Running At High Settings

The PC requirements are pretty clear about one thing – there are some “minimal requirements” that can offer you a “decent” game-play and some additional hardware that you can add to your system or even upgrade in order to enjoy a fully featured experience. The CPU needs to be of 3GHz, the RAM should be 1.5 GB (or more), the needed Hard Disk space is 12 GB, Nvidia 7800 or ATi X1950 as video cards (or the better newer models), a DirectX compatible sound card and a fast network/Internet connection for LAN or Internet multiplayer gaming.
The Nano-Suit

Among other novelties, Crysis also brings the muscle nano-suit concept: a highly advanced armor suit, capable of giving the gamer a few operating modes: super armor, super strength, extreme speed and advanced cloaking, according to what the tactics require for a successful combat technique. It has also been described as an exoskeleton military prototype suite as it really does look amazing and it can also help Jake Dunn (our main hero) in performing really difficult tasks. Too bad you can't use all the armor features at once! The artificial intelligence of the enemies in Crysis tends to be very realistic and very believable – for example the North Korean soldiers might smoke, salute superior officers, joke around (if you understand or know their Korean dialect) while Dunn can sneak behind them with the help of the cloaking system.
Crysis Action Video

How come only the Americans always have their government sponsoring such highly advanced military projects? I’m very sure that the governments in other countries are capable as well of providing the financial requirements in research for their defense systems. And this is “thrown” into their face when Jake Dunn (the US Army Delta Force Soldier) gets a strong fist into his face from a North Korean soldier wearing a very similar “nano-suit” in one of the first levels of the game. The tactics of the enemies are varied and complex too: they know how to hide, ambush and to adapt according to the surrounding environment. Although in the game description on the official website it is stated that the American and North Korean must join forces in order to fight against the aliens, I did not encounter a single moment when the two teams worked together against the aliens – so, the way I see it is that each “team” has its own interests and priorities and fights for its own purpose.

The game story is not very long and doesn’t have anything special or unique about it and that is one of the downsides of Crysis. It is spread out on 11 huge world-maps that take a lot of time to explore. It’s about a race of robotic aliens – they “land” on the Lingshan Islands, in the Philippine Sea, with their 2Km high ship. The North Korean troops have surrounded the area, have started evacuating the civilians and are already researching for ways of exploiting the new discovery with the help of a team of scientists. The first alien to attack the Delta Force squad appears while they were gliding down from the flying vehicle and makes them land in various areas, thus making things a little more difficult already. The next alien takes away Prophet, the team leader, away from them. This alien looks incredibly similar to the aliens with very big legs we saw in Half-Life 2 and War of the Worlds.

Following a few mission stops, Nomad (the codename of Jack Dunn) reaches a school in a village where a CIA agent was held hostage and she gives him critical information about the research facility that was set up by the Koreans. Nomad reaches the facility in the end and fights against Kyong, the Korean General. Because the structure of the research center becomes unstable, Dunn tries to get the research assistant out of there, but he remains blocked near what it looks to him as being a mineshaft.

He goes further into it in order to explore it and to find out a way hoping to get out of the mine. But what he discovers is that he wasn’t walking into a mineshaft, but the alien huge ship itself, as soon as he sees that the gravitation force fails to pull him down to the ground any longer. Through a series of “self-suggestive” comments, Nomad helps the gamer in getting through the twisted paths and air-vents of the ship in order to reach an opening where we see Prophet again, not only alive and kicking, but also wielding an alien big gun that can be used in defeating the flying blue aliens with robotic “tentacles”. This part was a bit annoying and reminded me of the Gothic game series where whenever you had a mission to guard someone or to escort somebody to safety they had the nasty and stupid habit of jumping out of the way and attacking beasts, mainly putting themselves in danger for no reason at all, making your mission even more “pleasant”. Sometimes he jumps right in front of your firing gun, but Prophet needs heat sources very often so be sure that you spot and mark a few while shooting the aliens.

After the return to the big aircraft carrier ship from the sea, Nomad will be shown another prototype of canon that can overload and destroy the internal structure of the alien mechanisms. In the meantime, the recordings of Nomad during his time in the alien ship have created a reason for issuing a nuclear attack against the alien ship from the island. Although, Helena, the research scientist, points out that it is useless and even more dangerous to launch such an attack, the missiles are launched anyway and thus the sphere that surrounded the alien ship (and the island as well – which caused the extremely low temperatures) expanded its size. A swarm of alien ships and aliens started heading towards the aircraft carrier ship in order to reach for its nuclear power core.

Nomad prevents them from accessing the nuclear power and starts a shoot-out on deck against a big alien monster that kidnapped Prophet earlier on. Now it was a very good time to access the functions of the nano-suit very wisely in order to win the battle. And no, this is was not the end – while fighting the aliens inside the carrier ship, Nomad took the prototype cannon as well and uses its power on the weak spots of the last enemy in the game, the big alien ship itself that is. The game ends with Nomad jumping into a VTOL flying vehicle, and the gamers gets to watch how the two big ships sink into the sea.

The sound in the game gives a good impression and I really liked the voices that announced the state of the nanosuit. The music, just like in other successful shooter titles is stimulating enough and has its own way of announcing certain events within the game. Since this game has an M rating (Mature) you will definitely hear some “raw” military language coming from the orders if you waste time and don’t follow the exact path towards an area you’re supposed to reach and act upon. Here’s what the developers have to say about the game:
Crysis Developer Interview

The multiplayer part has also a lot to offer as up to 32 players can join the game on a lan-party or on the internet servers. The game engine, Cry-Engine 2 has an impressive amount of features that could be explored a lot more, and so there is an application that comes bundled with the game, Sandbox Editor that allows the gamers to create and edit levels which is quite good and encouraging for the fan communities (just like the Unreal Editor was bundled with the Unreal Game Series). This might be the first game of a trilogy like more sources have mentioned – the point is – if this first game looks already extremely good and very lifelike, just imagine the graphics details of the next ones in the series.
Game Trailer

Digitainment Mark: 9.8 out of 10 (for truly impressive and life-like graphics)

Publisher: Electronic Arts (EA)

Official site: http://www.ea.com/crysis/

Developer: Crytek http://www.crytek.com