Review: Crysis game
Date : 01 16 2008 Category : Technology
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Emil Larsen, Personal Computer World, Thursday 17 January 2008 at 00:00:00
A little overhyped, but some excellent spells of gaming nonetheless
Far Cry appeared out of the blue in 2004 and quickly became an international PC favourite. The same developer, Crytek, has created plenty of hype about its latest outing, though, since it features an interesting game engine, dubbed Cryengine2, along with updated graphics that Microsoft has been touting as proof of DirectX 10's brilliance. Crysis' gameplay centres on a high-tech 'nano suit' that you and your comrades don to out-manoeuvre enemies. The suit has four main functions: invisibility, strength, speed or armour. Armour is the default setting and lets you take a lot more bullets without dying and enables your suit to recover the energy needed to perform the other functions. Invisibility will appeal to stealth-minded gamers, but it drains the suit's energy and wears out within a few seconds, which is a real disappointment. Strength is the most innovative suit setting, allowing you to jump several feet in the air onto buildings, over walls and even over enemy jeeps. Strength also means you can grab a bad guy by the neck and do away with him in one go. It takes a lot of practice to get used to changing suit types (you use the middle mouse button) but once mastered, different suit types can be called upon at speed, allowing you to use the skills you prefer. The plot is top-drawer stuff with decent voice acting throughout. You start off investigating a disturbance on a North Korean-controlled tropical island, the atmosphere of which feels a lot like Far Cry. After a few hours of dealing with the Koreans on foot, you get to a tank level which is unnecessarily difficult. We had to admit defeat and turn the settings down to 'easy' to get through, but even then we died a number of times. Get past that point, though, and aliens come out of the woodwork in some truly epic settings, the most impressive being a zero-gravity alien spaceship. The tank, jeep, flying and zero-gravity levels make the suit abilities less relevant, which is a shame because you'll only just have mastered them. Another major flaw is that the game ends halfway through the story. Aliens remain on the planet and other loose ends regarding the nano suit technology are left dangling. A sequel is undoubtedly around the corner and the boring online mode (which lacks any kind of team deathmatch) makes it very unsatisfying in the light of Half Life 2's The Orange Box, which provides several...
