Crysis - supposed to be one of the greatest pieces of computer game technology ever with photo realistic graphics and amazing physics allowing the player to blow trees up with cars and other such fun things to do - but is it actually a good game? Set in 2020, the story goes that an American team of archaeologists have been captured by the North Korean People’s Army when they were on the verge of an important discovery. The game starts in a plane as the five man Delta Force team  sent to get the archaeologists back get ready to deploy. Then things start to go pear-shaped, protagonist Jake Dunn (Callsign Nomad) has his parachute damaged by an unidentified object and misses the LZ. Set in the same type of luscious jungle as Crytek’s previous bestselling game, Far Cry, you have to say that Crysis looks absolutely amazing. From the jungle to the alien ship with its amazing technology and (slightly disorientating) zero gravity interior, to the frozen jungle after the aliens have showed up, your visor starts to get a bit frosty round the edges showing how cold it is, it all looks totally breathtaking even on relatively average computers. My PC with a 3.4 Pentium D, 2GB DDR-800, XFX 8800GT XXX running XP can be beaten by a lot of computers that cost little more than £400, yet it still manages 50+fps at 1280x1024 with everything on medium and that still looks amazing; wind it up to 1920x1200, everything on high and I feel I do not need to spend money on a holiday anymore, it looks absolutely AMAZING.  Even when I had my 7900GTX in there it could do 1280x1024, medium with 30fps so I haven’t seen much of the amazing hardware requirements.
So, the gameplay. What makes you able to defeat all of these Korean soldiers is your nanosuit, a protective exoskeleton with four different modes covering most situations; armour mode which uses the suits back up power to supplement your normal health, speed mode which helps you to run away when things get nasty and then finally there’s cloak mode, a mode that makes you invisible to the enemy, perfect for ambushing and sneeking past defences. The AI is pretty realistic, if you watch them before you intercept them you can see them smoking, laughing, chatting to one another and other such things that bored soldiers do. They are not too hard to pick off if you get them one by one, but sometimes you can come across a group of up to 20 of them, then it starts to get hard. Later in the game you meet Koreans in nanosuits similar to your own, and they take an awful lot of firepower to take down.
 The multiplayer is still a bit of a letdown though. There are only two modes, Instant Action (Deathmatch) where you will find weapons lying around for you to use and Power Struggle where there are two teams and various strategic buildings (spawning bunkers, war factory, naval factory), the way to win is to capture the Prototype Labratory and the Alien Energy Sites to get enough energy on your team to build nuclear weapons to use against the opposing teams base. For Power Struggle you really need to work as a team, capturing buildings together to protect yourselves, taking on tanks with c4 explosives and handheld missile launchers and finally working together to take out the enemy’s base defences so you can get some decent nuke shots at the base. The multiplayer does have an active modding community which has developed things such as Team Deathmatch, but because it is an optional mod there are very few players and even fewer servers.  There is also quite a bit of a cheating problem, with a lot of easily available hacks and high profile Crysis hackers out there, even with the inclusion of Punkbuster.
The multiplayer is still a bit of a letdown though. There are only two modes, Instant Action (Deathmatch) where you will find weapons lying around for you to use and Power Struggle where there are two teams and various strategic buildings (spawning bunkers, war factory, naval factory), the way to win is to capture the Prototype Labratory and the Alien Energy Sites to get enough energy on your team to build nuclear weapons to use against the opposing teams base. For Power Struggle you really need to work as a team, capturing buildings together to protect yourselves, taking on tanks with c4 explosives and handheld missile launchers and finally working together to take out the enemy’s base defences so you can get some decent nuke shots at the base.  The multiplayer does have an active modding community which has developed things such as Team Deathmatch, but because it is an optional mod there are very few players and even fewer servers. There is also quite a bit of a cheating problem, with a lot of easily available hacks and high profile Crysis hackers out there, even with the inclusion of Punkbuster.
All in all Crysis is more than just a glorified technology demo, yet there are still problems, the cheating, the short single player campaign and lack of multiplayer variety could all put you off, but dont let them because the fast paced, high adrenaline action and beautiful settings all vastly outweigh these mere gripes to what is a quite astonishing game. Definitely 10/10.
Crysis now has a standalone expansion pack, Crysis Warhead and Crysis Wars which somehow manage to improve upon the original, view our review here.
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