This is the part where people don’t realise they were led by their expectations and the pre-release hype, and that “only graphics no game” was decided long before they played it.
As everyone I didn’t expect this game to be good on anything but the atmosphere and presentation. But actually I had a blast. I have no idea how the other difficulty modes play, but playing on Delta is incredibly tense and satisfying. Crysis is not a “mindless shooter” or “half life in a bigger tunnel”, it’s a fucking stealth shooter for at least two thirds of it, and a damn fine one with that. You have an incredibly vast array of ways to approach a situation, exploiting the terrain, the physics, the buildings, ambushing korean patrols, crawling like the predator behind the prey invisible and ready to strike, or throwing a few grenades to a precise point to catch the attention of guards and expose them to your gunfire, using a vehicle-mounted turret, setting up remote controlled bombs, etc. etc.
As you need only a few bullets to die on that setting, everything must be well thought out, calculated, planned -from the beginning of the assault to even the escape routes- : “Should I miss my stealthy ambush and get spotted, what’s the best way to go ? That dense forest to the north, with the risk of being caught by a nearby patrol ? That jeep in the backyard, if only I can get it out of the camp quickly enough ? That cliff to the south, leaping towards the safe waters down there, but far away from my objective ?”. Yeah, right, it asks for some intellectual effort. Most people will just want to run in there, gun everyone, save and reload if killed. But the game gives you the power to make it a fantastic experience and that’s the same thing which made the gameplay of Thief appealing to me.
Crysis is, in a few words, a goldmine of voluntary satisfaction in tactics and combat with sheer amazement from the atmosphere and technology thrown inbetween. Of course that is for most of the game, the part before the alien facility. After that, it became a bit too linear and over the top (unlike HL2) for my tastes, but the combat was still as fun. The plot is your basic sci-fi hollywoodian script, but the characters are surprisingly believeable and a few ideas are brilliant. This itself would make the game redeemable if it played like Far Cry 1.5. So add to this the technology (graphics, physics), the setting and the gameplay, and you have my third contender FPS of 2007 with Orange Box and Stalker. I’d even put it oh so slightly above Episode 2 (for all it does NEW).
