Crysis

It is rare that I would share a detail this personal with my readers but given the nature of this review I feel it is necessary. Today I’ll be opening up my PC to you and allowing you to see what runs under the hood. Why? Because Crysis is a next-gen performance hog that claims to be perfectly scalable on any current machine. The studio claims that this is a good strategy since it makes the game future proof yet accessible to the everyman’s machine today. Here’s what I’m running under the hood and my own results:

Microsoft Windows XP

AMD Athlon™ 64 Processor  3700+  2.2 GHz

3 GB of RAM

ATI  X1800XT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card

While the game looks really attractive on my monitor and rarely drops frames I am plagued by the draw distance that the system has dictated to me. For example I’ll find myself blasting away at an enemy soldier without any effect. Once I take a few more steps a big rock will materialize between me and my foe. Likewise grass and foliage seem to magically appear as I walk around, ruining any pretense of immersion. Still that’s the price of not having a bleeding edge rig to test games on, so I will continue with the regularly scheduled review speaking no more of these problems.

Crysis starts out when you and a crack team of special-ops soldiers are dropped into thick jungle terrain in search for a missing archeological team. The rescue mission quickly becomes more complicated thanks to the presence of some alien entity on the island. You might notice a few similarities to the Predator script, especially when your teammates start getting picked off one by one. Still the bulk of your activity is far more and usually centers around blowing something up, be it a tank or radar tower or something.

Crysis is a spiritual successor to Far Cry, much like Bioshock was to System Shock. And like Bioshock your character has a set of easily accessible super powers to assist you on your mission. In this case your powers stem from a high tech nano-suit that is capable of shielding, healing, concealing or enhancing the wearer. Coupling these options with the good physics, passable stealth, vehicles and wide open terrains allows you a vast array of options as to how to approach a problem. This is often referred to as emergent gameplay, allowing a player to make things up as he goes along and play the game the way they find most fun. Given my complete lack of skill I tend to refer to it as accidental gameplay, in which one of my plans goes horribly wrong and I end up with a great story of how I barely made it out by the skin of my teeth. You know, like the time I accidentally smashed my getaway vehicle with a falling palm tree or the time I snuck up behind a group of soldiers just to be spotted by the group immediately behind them, effectively surrounding myself.

As a highly attractive and open ended first person shooter this game is at the top of the pile, but unfortunately I cannot guarantee that your machine will be able to handle it. You are probably best of downloading the Demo first, an unwieldy 1.77 GB taste of the future. Meanwhile I’ll be here daydreaming what the game will look and play like when I buy my next computer in a few years.