Replayability is one of those terms bandied around by developers and publishers in an attempt to make the latest game seem like a better investment for us, the gamers. Unlockable bonuses, achievements and harder difficulty modes are all used to try and make us spend as much time with the game as possible.  The only games that ever offer true replayability are those with some free-form element to the gameplay.  Without that ability to approach the world in your own way, and crucially to have the world react differently, there's just no impetus. This is why Far Cry was such a good game. From the moment you set foot on its glorious sands, until just about the time you saw your second Trigen, the AI of the enemy mercenaries and the vast, sweeping islands made for a fantastic playground of gun-play and destruction.

Crysis builds up on this, giving you the same amount of freedom its spiritual predecessor gave you, coupled with one of the most advanced graphical engines of this day and age. Yes, at the core this is just a technical overhaul of a 3 year old game, but believe me when I say you probably won’t be thinking of that when you see this in motion. An interesting fact is that the game actually has a story that can’t be summed up in a single sentence (well, it can but then you lose all of the finer detail the authors sprinkled in there). Yes, unlike in Far Cry you won’t be just shooting people for the sake of it. You’ll be shooting them for mankind’s survival *cough*!

Spec Ops galore

Actually there are some changes to who you’ll be fighting. Gone are the hated Trigens, replaced by strange aliens (which are actually fun to shoot). The humans were also replaced with (*drumroll*) humans! Well, instead of fighting a plethora of nationalities from Far Cry you’ll be focusing your firepower on North Koreans which have taken over the island group. The first third of the game is undoubtedly the most fun. Initially, you are a Spec Ops soldier with a futuristic nano-suit, deployed on a tropical island to find out why the NKA are so interested in an archaeologist and his team. Your suit allows you to deploy its energy reserves so that it acts as a visual cloak (think Predator), absorbs incoming fire, and boosts your speed or strength. However, you are no Superman: the energy reserves are pretty minimal, allowing you to only take a few bullets, run so far or jump so high before it has to recharge. While it does, you effectively have no armor, leaving damage to impact your vulnerable health reserves. The suit is really core to the fun you have in the majority of the game. It allows you to devise cunning plans from afar, infiltrate areas stealthed and wreak havoc in exactly the way you choose. 

The one-click nature of each mode means a botched stealth infiltration can lead to an impromptu super-speed dash for cover and the subsequent construction of an impromptu, super-strength-propelled, man-missile, fashioned from a NKA soldier. The balance of power and vulnerability is honed to perfection. You are often forced to tackle large numbers of infantry, and without your suit your deaths would be swift, but you will usually emerge from a massive fire-fight breathless but exhilarated, kept alive by the suit's power and your own ingenuity. Giving you the choices over your assault is the key to the majority of the fun you have, and the reason that Crysis will be with you for months to come, just so you can go back and assault that base 'one more time'.

Like all good things though, this doesn't last. If the first third sees you thoroughly let off the leash, the second third draws you back in a bit. Crytek, obviously mindful of maintaining variety turn this segment into a more Call of Duty experience. You are given tanks and allies to join with, and the pace intensifies, but at the same time the requirement for anything other than 'Maximum Armor' (even the way the suit tells you which mode it's in is cool!) is lost. Let's get this straight: it's not bad by any means, but I suspect the gradual (and subtle it has to be said) change in pace will make you appreciate the early hours all the more. Having said that, the feel of being in a warzone is palpable and often electrifying, which inevitably leads on to the alien segment. 

Again, some clarification: Crytek have clearly learnt from the Trigens fiasco (show me one person that liked them and I’ll show you somebody who likes obstacles that are impossible to overcome), and the challenges the aliens in Crysis pose are different and more exciting. After what precedes them, the final sections are even more linear. But again, where exploring the alien structures could have been confusing and boring, your character provides narration, guiding you subtly through the strange surroundings. This too, exhibits the same level of polish. Visual cues and enemy movements suggest a logical route for you through the weirdness, mostly without you realizing it, and when it comes to it, combat takes on a new feel (gravity is not what it was back on the island, and that only goes to amplify the alien-ness of it all). Finally, the game's finale (about 10-15 hours after the start), like the overall story, is predictable and clichéd, but cheerily gung-ho at the same time.

A struggle for (processing) power

So what happens if you want to up the ante and replace AI with human 'intelligence', and get some multiplayer action? Well, predictably enough, deathmatch is present and correct, with the added caveat that your opponent could disappear round the side of a building and cloak, then reappear with super-strength and punch you into next week! The range of tactics available to the thinking gamer vastly increases and some great firefights result. Add to the that a territory-based mode (power struggle) where you have to capture points to power the war machine, until you can use nukes to blow the enemies facility, and you have a bit more than the standard MP fare. Power struggle plays sort of a cross between Battlefield and the HL mod Science and Industry and works well once you've learnt its nuances.

Crysis lives up to its own hype, and does it by the bucket-full. There is almost nothing you will see in the whole game that is not one step closer to photo-realism than what has gone before. If you have the rig to handle it, turn the detail up to Very High in DX10 mode, and just go explore. I guarantee your jaw will drop. If it's not the way light refracts through the water, it'll be the animations of all the humans you meet. If not the dappling of sunlight through the forest canopy, you won't fail to admire the way the light changes throughout the day. As you progress through the story, your dazzled eyes will take in tropical vistas flash-frozen, strange alien machinery and the most believable explosions you will ever die from!

As Far Cry raised the bar in terms of what was possible at the time, so again does Crysis re-define what we can expect from our games. Barring the extremely rare duff texture, the only immersion-breaker is the odd physics snafu. It's brilliant being able to launch soldiers through sheet-metal shacks, or land your jeep on the roof, and cackle as the whole thing collapses, but when your jeep gets stuck on a tiny rock or a soldier has some kind of rapidly vibrating death throe it breaks the spell a wee bit. It doesn't happen very often, but I had to replay one section numerous times purely because the enemy air gunships kept landing on my shelter as I blew them out of the sky (with the resultant fireball). Realistic it may be, but frustrating the fifth or sixth time around. It's not really fair to blame Crysis alone for this though. As games integrate ever more realistic physics, the complex interactions are bound to cause the odd glitch.

Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for – the system requirements. On paper they are not so high, but suffice it to say that even high end Core 2 Duo systems working together with a GeForce 8800 can’t handle the load at anything over 1600x1200 (with noticeable performance drops even there). Yes, even the high and mighty 8800 cards have finally met a game that can choke them. That’s especially true when using DX10 in combination with Very High settings (which can to some extent be enabled on DX9 hardware as well via configuration file tweaks). The odd thing is that (with a reasonable resolution) the game feels smooth even when the framerates are hovering around 30fps thanks to the blur effects when moving. Unfortunately this relative smoothness still comes with the price of sluggish aiming, so while the game might look like it is performing well playing it tells a completely different story.

You don’t have a high end system but still want to give this game a try? You might be in luck, for the game has tons of different settings you can tweak, ranging from texture resolution changes to turning off post processing effects (blur, depth of field, etc.). Unfortunately though, with each setting disabled the game loses some of its visual flare, up to the point of it becoming similar to Far Cry running on a mediocre PC (still decent, but nowhere near what is possible). And, like with any pixel shader extensive game the most effective way to increase the performance is to drop the resolution. Playing the game on high settings is possible on an X1950XTX, but you’ll be forced to swallow the prehistoric 1280x768 to stay around 30fps most of the time.

The CPU also plays a major role in the performance of the game. It can be played on a single-core system, but you’ll most likely want (and have) to sacrifice physical accuracy to avoid major hitching when things blow up (sending dozens of objects flying into the air). The huge issue here is that while losing some of the visual effects doesn’t directly affect gameplay, this does. As an example, you can use the bodies of your foes as cover if you lie directly behind them. With enough enemies in front of you, you can actually stack them up and use them as sand-bags of sorts. Lower the physics quality however and you give up the stacking of bodies, the realistic destruction of most objects and more. Owners of 64-bit systems will be glad to hear that the game actually performs significantly better in a 64-bit OS. The downside is that at least on this system the game became a lot more unstable, crashing every few hours (even though the system was built from scratch).

We tested the game on a Intel V8 system, which is a 3ghz, dual cpu, 8 core Pc with 16 Gigabytes of memory and an overclocked 8800 Ultra graphics card. With this system running Windows Vista 64bit the game was playable (40fps+) with almost everything on very high at 1920x1080, however we experienced a BSOD if water quality was set to very high. Apart from this single setting, everything ran exceptionally well, however we would expect this to be the case especially considering this particular system is worth well over 5k, interestingly one of the cpu's was idle throughout, so this particular CPU powerhouse isn't being fully utilised. It is fair to say if you want to game at anything close to 1920 with maximum eye candy you are going to need to spend considerable money on upgrades.

Conclusion

It may be tempting to conclude that Crytek should stick to what they are 'good at' (i.e. the free-form jungle bash), but that would be very unfair. Crysis is a very important game on many levels. First of all, we need a graphical beast like this to remind us just how good our PCs are (or should be!), and to give us the impetus for that upgrade we've been putting off for ages. We need it to show us how awe-inspiring games are as a medium, and we need to be reminded of just how much fun gaming can be, left to your own devices on a desert island with a trillion-dollar nanosuit, and a hand-held mini nuclear grenade launcher.