System killer (but fun)

I have been playing first person shooters (FPS) for a while now and I really enjoyed Crysis. The game is your typical bad dude special ops person that is sent into a hot spot to do something (rescue some scientists) and ends up encountering some bad aliens intent on taking over the world. This is a reasonably fun premise that enables many different types of combat and can get extra crazy once the aliens get involved. I won’t give away too much of the plot but I thought the “regular” fighting with the other humans was actually more fun than the later alien stuff. I mean if there really were advanced alien races don’t you think they would just fry all our brains or send out some virus to turn us all to jelly? Of course that would be a pretty boring game and it is a lot more fun to battle aliens that are just a tad more advanced than us that we can kill if we try hard enough. Hey I played all the Doom incarnations and it can be a fun ride if it is done right. The whole Crysis experience is very well done and I enjoyed almost all of the game.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still things that cause you to remember you are playing a game on a computer. Like when you kill a guard at long range and his buddy gets excited for a few seconds but then reverts back to normal patrol mode. I think he is at a slightly higher alert status but I think in the “more” real world he would be freaking out, or at least hiding under cover and trying to find the sniper, not walking back and forth as if I was 10 feet away. Then the whole alien twist just feels added on. Using an alien gun is cool but now the whole AI can just be made up, we really don’t know how they would act. So maybe Crysis does a good job or not, we just don’t know. The ending is a bit TOO open ended but I guess after Half Life 2 everybody is setting themselves up for a sequel. I felt a bit let down as I watched the credits roll by.

One thing that I love is that you can totally drag your system to its knees if you want, this is actually a good thing . . . If any (and I mean any) of your friends have a “hot” gaming system and brag about how nothing can slow them down, then just have them install Crysis and crank up all the graphic effects to the max. I guarantee that any system built today will not be able to run the game smoothly at high resolution (over 1600x1200) with everything maxed out. This game is a system killer, or more accurately a great system tester. Sure benchmarks are fun but if you can get your system tweaked out so you can run with water effects on High then you are rewarded with some amazing game visuals that you are actually playing. Kind of like actually racing a fast car you built. My system was “hot” at one time but has fallen down the scale a bit. I really enjoyed turning the effects on and off to try out what was possible and to enjoy what the programmers were trying to do. Like when your character gets out of the water and the water runs off the display visor in a very realistic fashion, refractions and everything, WOW. The ability to shoot out the tire of a vehicle and cause it to loose control is pretty cool. So from a technical standpoint this is by far the best game of the year (in my opinion) but from a pure game design standpoint I think it is a just another good FPS.

Bradman