53Tabsa personal weblog, or “blog,” by William Shank and friends

As many of you know, crysis is one of the games that we hear at 53tabs have been waiting along time for. We talked about the single player demo last month, and its interesting to see how it has progressed since then.

The Story:
The plot for the game sees players as Codename: Nomad, an American soldier who is part of an elite, high-tech soldier squad who is tasked with evacuating some archaeologists from a small group of jungle-filled islands after the Koreans take them all hostage.

I’m trying to remain utterly spoiler-free here, but I think we can all see where this is going, right? Yep, aliens. They arrive on the island due to the meddling of aforementioned archaeologists and promptly set about doing the usual alien-things. Flash freezing the island, abducting people and so on.

The plot does take a few twists and turns, but mostly it’s a by-the-numbers kind of affair and serves only to contextualise the violence a little bit. The focus of the game is very much on the graphics and gameplay, not the story. That’s fine though – if gamers were really interested in a character-driven game with a strong plot and several different arcs then they’d play something else.

The game tries to stay vaguely realistic nonetheless and gives players a load of abilities to help make things more than just a run-n-gun, which are explained by way of a futuristic nanosuit. Every man in your squad owns a nanosuit and can use a whole load of different power-ups while the suit still has charge – including speed, strength, armour and jumping augmentations. The suit also lets players cloak themselves and customise their weapons by adding new attachments and so on.

As the story chugs along, players will be running around doing all sort of different things but mainly killing Koreans and turning off radar scramblers for the first part of the game. The story is nicely paced though, so just when you’re getting tired of blowing up bases you can expect something a little different to happen. Personally, I didn’t really get tired of blowing stuff up at all, but nevermind.

The thing which really plagues the game’s opening though – both in terms of narrative and gameplay – is the complete lack of a decent introduction. The game makes the assumption that you’ve read and understood all the manual, which isn’t unreasonable, but is a bit unrealistic. Everyone knows they should read the manual, but nobody ever does, right?

WASD, mouse, shoot the bad-guys is usually all you need to know for most games. The problem is that Crysis isn’t most games and has been aggressively marketed on the premise that it’s a cut above the rest – so something as simple as explaining what the hell a nanosuit is, why you have it and who exactly you work for is a bit odd.

Gameplay:
The weapon customisation is one which really, really works and it’s great to see that players can now carry a sensible array of weapons – two rifles, a pistol or two, an explosive weapon, plus grenades and your fists – as well as being able to customise them. Players can now choose to add silencers, scopes, grenade launchers, sights and much, much more to their arsenal. It’s fantastic, even if it does get pretty much redundant once you’ve put a scope, launcher and silencer all on your best assault rifle.

The suit itself is also a bit of a game-breaker, albeit an incredibly fun one. Players are free to use the suit however they want and I didn’t have any trouble getting to grips with it at all. Within minutes I was switching between the different modes and treating the suit as a second skin. The power for the suit drains incredibly quickly, especially on stealth or speed modes, but it also recharges fairly quick too.

The level graphics aside are very well designed and open ended. Crysis doesn’t force a style on you. There’s multiple entries to most areas and only the occasional minefield, or unbreakable cliff stopping you from going a specific direction.

One of my favorite things about the game that is a little harsh is the fact that if a battle gets overwhelming then you can always grab an enemy by the throat and use him as a human shield or chuck him off a ledge.

The range of vehicles is also pretty fantastic and there’s a fair few different types of trucks, cars, tanks and helicopters for players to whiz around in, which is always a plus. I did think that it was a little odd that players had the option to change through a number of different seats in each vehicle, but lone drivers were always in control of the machine guns remotely – but it’s something that I’m willing to overlook for the sake of balancing.

The physics in this game are great when they work properly. There were a few times where I would through a grenade into a building and the wall’s would completely disappear once destroyed. Other times bodies would fall through items such as walls, floors, and other solid objects. With that said the physics are fantastic every other time.

Graphics:
This game is the best looking game I have ever seen. With that said however:

The problem is that the game demands a lot from a system and, if you want to see the best of the physics, then you’ll want to be running something pretty high-end. The physics system is run on the CPU obviously and is mercifully optimised for mu
ltiple cores, so you’ll need a quad-core to see the really good stuff. Our testing though showed that the physics could get by on a single core Athlon 64 too though if you pushed the quality back to Medium. Medium physics quality is perfectly passable for most people, though you may miss out on a few of the more complex effects – when watchtowers collapse under a rocket, for example.

If you aren’t sure if your system will run Crysis with all the bells and whistles then the chances are that it won’t though. You’ll need a powerful rig just to reach Medium details and something meatier still to step up to High or Very High. If your system is fully optimised for DirectX 10 then the general guideline is that you’ll be able to manage having most of the settings on High.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the game (at the time of writing) the game doesn’t have any reliably optimised drivers either. We tried the game out on a selection of different systems and met radically different results. The standard gaming rig, packing two 8800 GTS and 2GB of RAM on Vista Home Premium struggled to get decent FPS and had low twenties with everything set on Medium quality. With the same system running XP pro we managed to get a decent FPS of around 25 to 29. We also had a lot of audio conflicts with vista even though we had all the latest drivers installed. The audio issues disappeared in XP so it was probably just Vista messing up on me again.

I switched to another system running a ATI Radeon x1950. this card wasn’t optimised or supported yet driver-side, so there were glitches and the FPS was still scraping twenty even in empty areas on Medium quality.

Conclusion:
Is Crysis revolutionary? Kind of. Is it a game of the year contender for me? I would say yes, but this year there has some stiff competition and games like BioShock and Episode Two have to take precedence in my eyes. The most telling thing I think is that I’m actually getting tired of talking about the game, although I still have things to say. That’s something which doesn’t happen with other games, such as (yes, I’ll point to it again) BioShock or Episode Two.

This is a great first person shooter that has great replayability. Once some good SLI drivers come out this game will hopefully fix most of the things that I don’t like about this game.

Gameplay: 8
Features: 7
Graphics: 10
Replayability: 8

Overall: 8/10