Crysis
So I'm sure some of you read my most recent post and thought "That's not why we come here!" Not wanting anyone to go away disappointed, I present a review of the game Crysis. This is a game that came out a couple of years ago, but I only recently started playing. When it was first given to me, my computer couldn't actually run it (in my computer's defense, when this game came out, less than 5% of the computers in the US met the minimum requirements to play it). Major spoilers below, so be warned.
Crysis is a first-person shooter (FPS) in the same vein as Doom, Quake, or Halo. You see the action through the eyes of the protaganist and your goal is to complete several different missions while avoiding being killed by literally hundreds of enemies who all have it in for you. There are a couple of things that set this game apart from most FPSs that I've played in the past.
Weapon customization is the ability to modify your weapons based on situation. A silencer lets you take out enemies quietly, but reduces the range and power of your weapons. Laser pointers make you more accurate, but give away your position. A number of different sights and scopes are available, from the basic sights on your shotgun to a 10x magnifying sniper scope (and you really do use them all; when you're running around the crowded halls of an aircraft carrier, 10x magnification is useless). And what's better than 7.62mm NATO standard issue rounds? Incidiary ammo that explodes when it hits a target, baby!
The second, and by far most significant change that puts this game ahead of other FPSs is the nanosuit. It's basically a micro-mech that you wear which gives you superhuman capabilities. It has four basic modes:
Maximum Armor (my wife swears she hears that as 'Maximum Vulva' every time I switch to this mode) makes you somewhat bulletproof. Just about every FPS gives the character some kind of shield against enemy weaponry. Once the shield runs down, you start taking health damage. The nanosuit's armor mode fills this role. Nothing new here. As you take damage, the energy on your suit drains. Once it reaches zero, you start taking health damage. The suit's energy replenishes fairly quickly; your health, much less so.
Maximum Speed makes you walk twice as fast as normal without consuming energy. You can also run in speed mode, which drains your suit energy very quickly, but you move at impossible speeds. I love this mode. Many games of this type involve a lot of running from one place to another, which can be long and boring. This mode cuts down on the monotony a lot. So while this isn't the sexiest ability of the nanosuit, it's a huge improvement from a gameplay perspective.
Maximum Strength makes your character strong. You can pick up and throw very heavy objects (including enemies that you've grabbed!), jump extremely high, break down doors or even the walls of some ramshackle structures, and if you're sniping, it helps you hold your gun more steadily for a more accurate shot (at 10x magnification, your rifle swings a lot, and this is a huge help). This mode is a lot of fun. It's great to grab an enemy by the throat and toss him 20 or 30 feet away. The levels have been designed to take good advantage of the super jump ability, letting you hop up onto ridges you normally couldn't reach, jump onto the roofs of buildings, or leap over fences rather than trying to find an entrance (a great way to get out of trouble, too, since enemies can't follow you and the nearest gate could be several hundred feet away).
The winner in the 'sexiest ability of the nanosuit' contest has to be Stealth mode, however. Think Predator. Enemies will walk within 10 feet of you and not even know you're there. If you stand still while invisible, your suit's energy drains slowly. If you move, it drains quickly. If you run, it drains within a couple of seconds. Nonetheless, this is a very powerful ability. It's great for getting into position and then going invisible as soon as you shoot someone (firing while invisible drains your energy entirely, making you instantly visible and with zero energy), it's great for moving from cover to cover, and it lets you sneak up on enemies so you can grab them by the throat and toss them through a wall. A+ ability, would sneak again.
In addition to these two major gameplay advancements, a large portion of the environment is dynamic. If you throw a grenade near a shoddy structure, it will collapse. With a minigun or a mounted M-60, you can shoot down trees to eliminate enemy cover. Pesky enemy sniper in a tower? Use a rocket launcher to bring down the whole thing! You can even shoot birds as they fly overhead and watch them plummet to the ground (or the water, where they will make a satisfying splash).
Oh, and the graphics? This game is freaking gorgeous. Sure, I have to have two video cards installed to run it at high detail, but it's totally worth it. When bullets hit the trees and ground around you, mud and dirt fly up into your field of view. If you go for a swim, when you climb onto dry land, water runs down the front of your mask. It's like playing a movie, it's just that. Fucking. Awesome.
Yes, there's a lot of good in this game. I like the fact that you can choose to go one-man-army and blast your way through a level, or you can go ninja on their asses and complete mission without ever firing a shot. I like the interactive environment. From a gameplay standpoint, this is the best FPS I've ever played. Then there's the story.
So you're part of an elite Special Forces unit deployed to rescue team of archeologists who have been taken prisoner by the North Koreans on an island in the Pacific. They found something down there and the Koreans want it really badly. The first part of the game has you trying to locate and extract the hostages, and your opponents are all human. Then you hit the level when you discover the real threat of the game, the alien race that is a danger to both you and the other side. Sound familiar? It might. There was one level on Halo that I always referred to as "The level where Halo becomes Resident Evil." This game has the level where Crysis becomes Halo. It's very suspenseful, and the music is appropriately creepy. The alien ship is very eerie and is, as everything else in the game, rendered beautifully. But we've been there, you know? Gosh, the thing they were so desperate to uncover is actually a super-powerful alien race that threatens to wipe us all out? What an interesting and novel idea! I never would have seen that coming!
Then there are the aliens themselves. Outside of their encounter suits, they are a semi-transparent organism with long, thin bodies. They are capable of flight, and their bodies wave constantly as if they were underwater. Sound familiar at all? Oh wait, did I say 'encounter suit'? But wait, it gets better. You remember earlier when I said that the nanosuit in stealth mode is right out of Predator? In one cut-scene you get to see the alien's face up close, and when it opens its mouth, these four appendages, kind of like claws, extend from the four corners of its jaws. What's that, you say? Still not enough? But wait, there's more! In their encounter suits, the aliens have huge heads and six metallic tentacles that they use to grab and attack. They fly through the air with a back-and-forth motion that looks more like swimming than flying, and yes, they are capable of tearing through the walls of a ship to get to the people inside. The first time I saw one, my immediate impulse was to go for my EMP, but of course you don't have one of those... until the last level, that is. Yeah, I'm serious.
Early in the game, your commanding officer gets taken by one of the aliens. The first two people on your team (of five) that encounter the aliens end up dead, very quickly and very messily. So you naturally assume that he's a goner as well, and are somewhat surprised when he shows up again in one of the later missions. Not only is he still alive, he's managed to take one of the alien weapons, figured out how to use it, and supplied it with power by integrating it into his nanosuit. This is so improbable that in a cut-scene during the final mission (one of too-damn-many), one of the scientists remarks that it would have taken them weeks to reverse-engineer it in a lab, and he managed to do it within a matter of hours in the field. So you know immediately that something is up with him, and you'd be right. The weapon, by the way? It functions like a minigun, but as far as I can tell it does less damage. Really, it's a piece of crap, which probably explains why, once he catches up to you, he gives it to you and draws his pistol. Yeah, I'd rather use a 9mm than that piece of shit, too.
This mission takes place in an area of the island where the temperature is currently 200 below zero (not the usual climate for the region). Fortunately your suit protects you from environmental extremes, but unfortunately your boss's suit seems to be malfunctioning. He's slowly freezing to death, and so it's up to you to 1) defend him from the major onslaught of aliens who have all decided that you've apparently survived long enough and now it's time to get serious, 2) get him out of the freezing zone before he dies, and 3) escort him from burning wreck to burning wreck so that he can remain warm on the way to completing (2). That's right, a fucking escort mission.
Anyone who's ever played an RPG, FPS, or just about any other modern video game is familiar with the escort mission. You have to get another character from point A to point B, alive. Their death usually results in mission failure. The problem is, these characters are monumentally stupid. Prophet (your CO) is no exception. I failed this mission once because he froze to death, complaining the whole time that his suit's temperature was dropping rapidly, while he was 30 feet away from the burning wreck of a car. This is a guy who managed to take a piece of alien technology and interface it with a high-tech military supersuit using nothing more than a rock, a sharp stick, and a paper clip, but apparently has not figured out that when one is freezing to death, the proper course of action is to move closer to the fucking fire!
Then there's shark mission, as in "I jumped what?" This mission takes place on board the aircraft carrier USS Constitution. It opens, like most missions do, with a cut-scene. You then walk to the CDC (Combat Direction Center, not Center for Disease Control, though by this point in the game a supervirus that turns everyone into zombies would not have been wholly unexpected and, frankly, might have been more enjoyable than what you actually get). In the CDC you get another cut-scene. Then you walk to the Armory, and another cut-scene. Then you go up to the bridge. Another. God. Damned. Cut-scene. Then you run up to the deck and actually start fighting (at some point during all of this, Prophet has stolen a VTOL and is flying back to the island to 'finish this once and for all'; this becomes important later). I actually timed it, and more than half of this 'mission' is taken up by cut-scenes, or running from one part of the ship to another (to view another cut-scene). Anyway, after killing a bunch of tank-sized aliens (the same ones who kidnapped and killed two members of your team with little-to-no effort), you run down to the reactor room where the core is overloading. You deal with that threat, in the process killing several of the smaller aliens with your handy-dandy new EMP functionality (I told you I was serious), then it's back up to the bridge again to kill more of the tank-sized aliens. And something new.
This guy is referred to as the 'alien exosuit'. You've seen it twice before. The first time is on the alien ship, and it walks past you. This thing looks like a six-legged spider, is about thirty feet across and about as tall. The second time you see one, an entire platoon of marines armed with rocket launchers, mounted M-60s, anti-aircraft guns, and fricking gauss rifles is trying to kill it. They fail, and every single one of them dies. Now it's up to you to kill it, solo. No shit. Long story short, a couple of thousand (literally, the minigun uses 500-round drums, so it's easy to keep track) rounds, several rockets, and another EMP blast later, you finally defeat it. The last remaining member of your team (oh-so-cleverly named Psycho) is bringing a VTOL in to pick you up when an even bigger alien rises up from the ocean. Really? REALLY?
This thing probably stands a hundred feet tall and is about half the size of the carrier itself. In the end, after you've managed to defeat it (using, I shit you not, tactical nukes fired from a hand-held cannon), it collapses on top of the carrier and drags the whole thing beneath the waves. You make a run for the VTOL, jump on board, and are treated to another cut-scene that shows the ship sinking, a near-disaster when your archeologist friend (as comely as she is brilliant, she's the one who developed the EMP weapon) nearly falls from the back of the plane, and Psycho prepares to fly off into the sunset. That's when you say, "We know how to kill these things now, let's go finish the job. Besides, Prophet is still in there."
At this point, I was honestly thinking to myself, "Thank God, another mission. This would have been a terrible ending to the game. Hopefully the next mission will be good enough to wipe the memory of this one from my mind. Plus, I want to know what the hell is up with Prophet." Then the credits rolled. You have got to be fucking kidding me. I strongly considered removing the game from my hard drive, but I was too upset to do anything more so I just shut it down. I have since gone back and played the game again. I really enjoy the early levels. When I get to that horrid last mission, I simply kill it before the final cut-scene.
So, bottom line, how is the game?
Gameplay: As I said, the gameplay aspects (graphics, dynamic environment, plus innovations like the nanosuit and customizable weaponry) make this the best FPS I've ever played. Different means of accomplishing your missions give the game a lot of replayability, which is something I value highly. A+
Story: The story leaves a lot to be desired. It feels like they put all their creativity into the technical aspects of the game and couldn't spare any cycles for the plot. There are few surprises, none of them good. C
The Final Mission: I was going to give this an F, but before I denounced it so thoroughly, I wanted to be certain that it really deserved it. Was the final mission really that bad? Sure, it made me want to punch the developers in the crotch, but was it so execrable that it made me want to punch myself in the crotch? Was playing through that final mission, cut-scenes and all, really equivalent to watching 90 minutes of anime nonstop? No, it was not. Damn close, but no. D-
Crysis is a first-person shooter (FPS) in the same vein as Doom, Quake, or Halo. You see the action through the eyes of the protaganist and your goal is to complete several different missions while avoiding being killed by literally hundreds of enemies who all have it in for you. There are a couple of things that set this game apart from most FPSs that I've played in the past.
Weapon customization is the ability to modify your weapons based on situation. A silencer lets you take out enemies quietly, but reduces the range and power of your weapons. Laser pointers make you more accurate, but give away your position. A number of different sights and scopes are available, from the basic sights on your shotgun to a 10x magnifying sniper scope (and you really do use them all; when you're running around the crowded halls of an aircraft carrier, 10x magnification is useless). And what's better than 7.62mm NATO standard issue rounds? Incidiary ammo that explodes when it hits a target, baby!
The second, and by far most significant change that puts this game ahead of other FPSs is the nanosuit. It's basically a micro-mech that you wear which gives you superhuman capabilities. It has four basic modes:
Maximum Armor (my wife swears she hears that as 'Maximum Vulva' every time I switch to this mode) makes you somewhat bulletproof. Just about every FPS gives the character some kind of shield against enemy weaponry. Once the shield runs down, you start taking health damage. The nanosuit's armor mode fills this role. Nothing new here. As you take damage, the energy on your suit drains. Once it reaches zero, you start taking health damage. The suit's energy replenishes fairly quickly; your health, much less so.
Maximum Speed makes you walk twice as fast as normal without consuming energy. You can also run in speed mode, which drains your suit energy very quickly, but you move at impossible speeds. I love this mode. Many games of this type involve a lot of running from one place to another, which can be long and boring. This mode cuts down on the monotony a lot. So while this isn't the sexiest ability of the nanosuit, it's a huge improvement from a gameplay perspective.
Maximum Strength makes your character strong. You can pick up and throw very heavy objects (including enemies that you've grabbed!), jump extremely high, break down doors or even the walls of some ramshackle structures, and if you're sniping, it helps you hold your gun more steadily for a more accurate shot (at 10x magnification, your rifle swings a lot, and this is a huge help). This mode is a lot of fun. It's great to grab an enemy by the throat and toss him 20 or 30 feet away. The levels have been designed to take good advantage of the super jump ability, letting you hop up onto ridges you normally couldn't reach, jump onto the roofs of buildings, or leap over fences rather than trying to find an entrance (a great way to get out of trouble, too, since enemies can't follow you and the nearest gate could be several hundred feet away).
The winner in the 'sexiest ability of the nanosuit' contest has to be Stealth mode, however. Think Predator. Enemies will walk within 10 feet of you and not even know you're there. If you stand still while invisible, your suit's energy drains slowly. If you move, it drains quickly. If you run, it drains within a couple of seconds. Nonetheless, this is a very powerful ability. It's great for getting into position and then going invisible as soon as you shoot someone (firing while invisible drains your energy entirely, making you instantly visible and with zero energy), it's great for moving from cover to cover, and it lets you sneak up on enemies so you can grab them by the throat and toss them through a wall. A+ ability, would sneak again.
In addition to these two major gameplay advancements, a large portion of the environment is dynamic. If you throw a grenade near a shoddy structure, it will collapse. With a minigun or a mounted M-60, you can shoot down trees to eliminate enemy cover. Pesky enemy sniper in a tower? Use a rocket launcher to bring down the whole thing! You can even shoot birds as they fly overhead and watch them plummet to the ground (or the water, where they will make a satisfying splash).
Oh, and the graphics? This game is freaking gorgeous. Sure, I have to have two video cards installed to run it at high detail, but it's totally worth it. When bullets hit the trees and ground around you, mud and dirt fly up into your field of view. If you go for a swim, when you climb onto dry land, water runs down the front of your mask. It's like playing a movie, it's just that. Fucking. Awesome.
Yes, there's a lot of good in this game. I like the fact that you can choose to go one-man-army and blast your way through a level, or you can go ninja on their asses and complete mission without ever firing a shot. I like the interactive environment. From a gameplay standpoint, this is the best FPS I've ever played. Then there's the story.
So you're part of an elite Special Forces unit deployed to rescue team of archeologists who have been taken prisoner by the North Koreans on an island in the Pacific. They found something down there and the Koreans want it really badly. The first part of the game has you trying to locate and extract the hostages, and your opponents are all human. Then you hit the level when you discover the real threat of the game, the alien race that is a danger to both you and the other side. Sound familiar? It might. There was one level on Halo that I always referred to as "The level where Halo becomes Resident Evil." This game has the level where Crysis becomes Halo. It's very suspenseful, and the music is appropriately creepy. The alien ship is very eerie and is, as everything else in the game, rendered beautifully. But we've been there, you know? Gosh, the thing they were so desperate to uncover is actually a super-powerful alien race that threatens to wipe us all out? What an interesting and novel idea! I never would have seen that coming!
Then there are the aliens themselves. Outside of their encounter suits, they are a semi-transparent organism with long, thin bodies. They are capable of flight, and their bodies wave constantly as if they were underwater. Sound familiar at all? Oh wait, did I say 'encounter suit'? But wait, it gets better. You remember earlier when I said that the nanosuit in stealth mode is right out of Predator? In one cut-scene you get to see the alien's face up close, and when it opens its mouth, these four appendages, kind of like claws, extend from the four corners of its jaws. What's that, you say? Still not enough? But wait, there's more! In their encounter suits, the aliens have huge heads and six metallic tentacles that they use to grab and attack. They fly through the air with a back-and-forth motion that looks more like swimming than flying, and yes, they are capable of tearing through the walls of a ship to get to the people inside. The first time I saw one, my immediate impulse was to go for my EMP, but of course you don't have one of those... until the last level, that is. Yeah, I'm serious.
Early in the game, your commanding officer gets taken by one of the aliens. The first two people on your team (of five) that encounter the aliens end up dead, very quickly and very messily. So you naturally assume that he's a goner as well, and are somewhat surprised when he shows up again in one of the later missions. Not only is he still alive, he's managed to take one of the alien weapons, figured out how to use it, and supplied it with power by integrating it into his nanosuit. This is so improbable that in a cut-scene during the final mission (one of too-damn-many), one of the scientists remarks that it would have taken them weeks to reverse-engineer it in a lab, and he managed to do it within a matter of hours in the field. So you know immediately that something is up with him, and you'd be right. The weapon, by the way? It functions like a minigun, but as far as I can tell it does less damage. Really, it's a piece of crap, which probably explains why, once he catches up to you, he gives it to you and draws his pistol. Yeah, I'd rather use a 9mm than that piece of shit, too.
This mission takes place in an area of the island where the temperature is currently 200 below zero (not the usual climate for the region). Fortunately your suit protects you from environmental extremes, but unfortunately your boss's suit seems to be malfunctioning. He's slowly freezing to death, and so it's up to you to 1) defend him from the major onslaught of aliens who have all decided that you've apparently survived long enough and now it's time to get serious, 2) get him out of the freezing zone before he dies, and 3) escort him from burning wreck to burning wreck so that he can remain warm on the way to completing (2). That's right, a fucking escort mission.
Anyone who's ever played an RPG, FPS, or just about any other modern video game is familiar with the escort mission. You have to get another character from point A to point B, alive. Their death usually results in mission failure. The problem is, these characters are monumentally stupid. Prophet (your CO) is no exception. I failed this mission once because he froze to death, complaining the whole time that his suit's temperature was dropping rapidly, while he was 30 feet away from the burning wreck of a car. This is a guy who managed to take a piece of alien technology and interface it with a high-tech military supersuit using nothing more than a rock, a sharp stick, and a paper clip, but apparently has not figured out that when one is freezing to death, the proper course of action is to move closer to the fucking fire!
Then there's shark mission, as in "I jumped what?" This mission takes place on board the aircraft carrier USS Constitution. It opens, like most missions do, with a cut-scene. You then walk to the CDC (Combat Direction Center, not Center for Disease Control, though by this point in the game a supervirus that turns everyone into zombies would not have been wholly unexpected and, frankly, might have been more enjoyable than what you actually get). In the CDC you get another cut-scene. Then you walk to the Armory, and another cut-scene. Then you go up to the bridge. Another. God. Damned. Cut-scene. Then you run up to the deck and actually start fighting (at some point during all of this, Prophet has stolen a VTOL and is flying back to the island to 'finish this once and for all'; this becomes important later). I actually timed it, and more than half of this 'mission' is taken up by cut-scenes, or running from one part of the ship to another (to view another cut-scene). Anyway, after killing a bunch of tank-sized aliens (the same ones who kidnapped and killed two members of your team with little-to-no effort), you run down to the reactor room where the core is overloading. You deal with that threat, in the process killing several of the smaller aliens with your handy-dandy new EMP functionality (I told you I was serious), then it's back up to the bridge again to kill more of the tank-sized aliens. And something new.
This guy is referred to as the 'alien exosuit'. You've seen it twice before. The first time is on the alien ship, and it walks past you. This thing looks like a six-legged spider, is about thirty feet across and about as tall. The second time you see one, an entire platoon of marines armed with rocket launchers, mounted M-60s, anti-aircraft guns, and fricking gauss rifles is trying to kill it. They fail, and every single one of them dies. Now it's up to you to kill it, solo. No shit. Long story short, a couple of thousand (literally, the minigun uses 500-round drums, so it's easy to keep track) rounds, several rockets, and another EMP blast later, you finally defeat it. The last remaining member of your team (oh-so-cleverly named Psycho) is bringing a VTOL in to pick you up when an even bigger alien rises up from the ocean. Really? REALLY?
This thing probably stands a hundred feet tall and is about half the size of the carrier itself. In the end, after you've managed to defeat it (using, I shit you not, tactical nukes fired from a hand-held cannon), it collapses on top of the carrier and drags the whole thing beneath the waves. You make a run for the VTOL, jump on board, and are treated to another cut-scene that shows the ship sinking, a near-disaster when your archeologist friend (as comely as she is brilliant, she's the one who developed the EMP weapon) nearly falls from the back of the plane, and Psycho prepares to fly off into the sunset. That's when you say, "We know how to kill these things now, let's go finish the job. Besides, Prophet is still in there."
At this point, I was honestly thinking to myself, "Thank God, another mission. This would have been a terrible ending to the game. Hopefully the next mission will be good enough to wipe the memory of this one from my mind. Plus, I want to know what the hell is up with Prophet." Then the credits rolled. You have got to be fucking kidding me. I strongly considered removing the game from my hard drive, but I was too upset to do anything more so I just shut it down. I have since gone back and played the game again. I really enjoy the early levels. When I get to that horrid last mission, I simply kill it before the final cut-scene.
So, bottom line, how is the game?
Gameplay: As I said, the gameplay aspects (graphics, dynamic environment, plus innovations like the nanosuit and customizable weaponry) make this the best FPS I've ever played. Different means of accomplishing your missions give the game a lot of replayability, which is something I value highly. A+
Story: The story leaves a lot to be desired. It feels like they put all their creativity into the technical aspects of the game and couldn't spare any cycles for the plot. There are few surprises, none of them good. C
The Final Mission: I was going to give this an F, but before I denounced it so thoroughly, I wanted to be certain that it really deserved it. Was the final mission really that bad? Sure, it made me want to punch the developers in the crotch, but was it so execrable that it made me want to punch myself in the crotch? Was playing through that final mission, cut-scenes and all, really equivalent to watching 90 minutes of anime nonstop? No, it was not. Damn close, but no. D-