#8: Crysis - Hands Like Gravity Guns

Please keep your bodily appendages inside the blog while in motion, because this week's game is Crysis, and there are going to be a lot of screenshots this time.

Here's some box art, you moochers.

Extra big picture for extra big cool.

A quick rundown of what I knew about Crysis when I hit the launch button:

1. Crysis has a reputation for being one of the most gorgeous games available if your computer is powerful enough to run it on max settings (mine is).

2. You have a power-suit thing vaguely reminiscent of Master Chief (oh, so this game has regenerating shields and HP. Check.)

3. There's some kind of jungle. (It turned out that there was, in fact, some kind of jungle.)

So the first thing I do, of course, is max out my settings. Then I start a new game. 

My nano-suited super marine special ops guy code named Nomad parachutes onto an island with a few fellow nano-suit troopers to recover some archaeologists being held hostage by those darn evil Koreans. Of course, on the way down something that looks an awful lot like an alien goofs up your descent, and you land on a beach. 

And then this happens.

But. . . But he's probably a protected species! 

Why would I want to pick up a tortoise?

Go! Be free! Fly with your fellow tortoises!

Oh, because this is a wildlife hurling simulator. Got it.

I follow the map a bit more and encounter some bad guys, who I shoot with my gun in a radical divergence from FPS norms. The game has introduced the basic concept of my suit having "modes" at this point, those modes being Armor, Speed, Strength, and Stealth. Strength in particular lets you jump higher, punch harder, throw harder, and hold weapons steadier (lame).

Knowing this, I save a special kind of death for the last enemy Korean.

Time for a crabs epidemic.

They don't need to be half-life headcrabs to be just as deadly. At least when thrown at high speeds.
I call this one "The Deadliest Catch".

So here's where I need to come clean: a large chunk of my screenshots are just me presenting new and exciting ways to kill people by throwing things at them. I did not realize the extent to which I was doing this until I looked through my files after the fact.

What does that mean to you, the reader? It means you're about to get a photo album of all of the ridiculous thrown projectiles that I murdered Koreans with.

Enjoy.

RETURN THE SHOPPING CART TO THE CART CORRAL NEXT TIME SO IT DOESN'T HIT MY CAR YOU JERK

Look at the shell-shocked expression on that chicken's face. He's seen some seriously messed up stuff. And he's about to see more.

That blurry frog-shaped object is a frog. Sadly, the frog was not fatal to anyone I threw it at, and resulted in several deaths while trying.

I'm actually not positive what this is, but I think it's a locker. And I'm pretty sure that I killed a few guys around the corner with it.

To my surprise, I could carry and throw an entire dumpster as long as I tilted the screen upward so that I wasn't dragging it along the ground.

I went deep sea diving for more exotic items to throw at people. Sadly, I could not pick up fish or brain coral.

They seem tired.

Alright, enough of that. I suppose I owe some serious analysis and explanation of the "actual game" of Crysis.

Crysis tries really hard to be realistic when you aren't using your suit powers to launch fatal crab-missiles at people. This is actually one of the coolest things about Crysis. You actually feel like a normal human in a world full of other normal humans, except you have a super cool nano-suit that lets you occasionally break the rules. Where you shoot people matters, objects seem to have the proper amount of "heft", the physics on driving vehicles makes sense and your tires can be blown out, and considering we're in a world with nano-suits the guns are surprisingly similar to modern ones aside from a few late-game additions to the arsenal. 

While the game is futuristic, you still do the pretty standard "aim down the sights with the submachine gun in cover" style stuff. They even got the focus right. The guys who made this graphics engine are pretty talented.

Adding to this realism is the fact that the game rarely funnels you down the "proper route" to defeating a group of enemies. The environments are some of the most plausibly laid out that I've seen yet in a first person shooter. There's tons of open space, you can approach from a multitude of directions with a multitude of methods in most cases (with varying effectiveness), and if you so choose you can even avoid the enemies entirely with many of the objectives. I will say, however, that you will probably have to do it by juking from point to point at breakneck speed with Speed mode, because the Stealth/Cloaking mode is pretty weak and never seemed to fool enemies when I used it even with cover.

As an aside, I don't think Stealth mode counts as "working really well" just because it's dark.

Essentially, you're a futuristic ninja marine who fights off hordes of Koreans. And later, aliens. I don't consider that a spoiler because it should be obvious to anyone within the first couple minutes of the game.

Don't worry, it's really not much like Halo at all.

This realism occasionally has its downsides, however. There were several times where I could have done without it, such as the time I shot down a helicopter and it landed on the building I was in resulting in my death, or when I was driving a Humvee, hit a big bump pretty fast, and dealt about 30% damage to my own vehicle and blew up. Crysis also does a remarkably poor job of communicating your cause of death, which depending on your perspective is either cool or terrible. I know at one spot I walked into mines a few times before realizing the reason I kept spontaneously exploding and dying, and there are many spots throughout the game that I will never actually know why I died.

The first half of Crysis plays almost like an entry in the Call of Duty series, whereas the second half takes a decidedly sci-fi turn with the aforementioned aliens. I have to admit that the first half was a bit bland for my tastes, but it got much more interesting over time. Driving a tank and a helicopter can help in that department as well.

Game design lesson learned: tanks are fun.

Overall, I enjoyed Crysis precisely because it was so realistic in so many ways, yet it tried to make you feel like a superhuman in the same setting. It takes you through a decent amount of different environments (though you spend too much time in the jungle at the start in my opinion), and has a relatively satisfying plot arc. Of course, it had a cliffhanger non-ending that practically screamed "we were already starting the sequel when we made this". That's fine though, because I own Crysis: Warhead and Crysis 2 as well. I'll get to them.

Eventually.

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