Crysis (PC)

Pack your nano suit and head out to paradise; it's time for a Crysis.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Of course, technology can only get you so far. For gameplay, Crysis gives you the requisite guns, but it also throws a nano suit into the bargain. This can be used for extra armor or speed, for instance. But it also offers you new ways to interact with the environment. The strength power lets you jump to places you wouldn't normally be able to reach, effectively doing an end-run around the level design. Similarly, the cloaking lets you circumvent combat by turning invisible until you attack. Here you get that delicious sense of watching and waiting that comes with any good stealth game. The limiting factor is movement. If you stay in one place, you can pretty much cloak indefinitely. But the faster you move, the faster you drain your pool of nano-stamina, or tech-mana, or suit juice, or badass energy, or whatever it's called. Set up ambushes by waiting, or carefully dash from hiding place to hiding place, recharging as you go.

You can change nano-powers with a pop-up radial dial, but there are also helpful double-tap commands that make it a lot more fluid. Master these and you can speed run up to someone, activate strength, grab him, and toss him over a cliff, then cloak to wait until his buddies investigate. Uncloak, activate your armor, and let the firefight begin.

There's a similar flexibility with the weapons, which never get too crazy. Although you'll eventually get a ridiculously big mini-gun and a special hi-tech weapon, for the most part you're using semi-realistic firepower. But at any moment, you can kit out any given gun with a silencer, various scopes and targeting options, a flashlight, and even ammo types. Presumably all this stuff fits into the pockets of your nano suit. Just go with it.

Considering that 80 percent of the game is set on the same tropical island, Crysis does a great job varying the setting. For instance, a huge harbor shows off how the developers carefully created an open world. You need to destroy a few AA guns, which are little more than arbitrary objectives, but they're situated in such a way that you're rewarded for scouting out the area and trying new approaches. Working your way around roads, exploring underwater tunnels, and stealthing among cargo containers are all viable alternatives to just forcing your way in with brute firepower. Crysis allows -- indeed, encourages! -- any combination of these approaches. The whole thing feels like a playground, but with guns. And in the end, the harbor offers you an explosive payoff.

It's too bad the same can't be said about Crysis as a whole. This is a game that would have done well to end about two hours sooner. Fortunately, you can cleanse the sour taste left in your mouth with Crysis' multiplayer game. It takes full advantage of the wide-open terrain to create a tactically sophisticated game of capture points, vehicle battles, equipment upgrades, and superweapons. It's like a mix of Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2142, and Quake Wars. It still needs to be tidied up a bit, and hopefully the player base won't be too limited by the steep hardware requirements. But it's enough to keep you going well after the otherwise excellent single-player game has ground to its disappointing conclusion.

This review was based on a retail copy provided by the publisher.