Reviewed by Barry Little - December 20, 2007

ESRB Rating: M (Mature 17+)

On November 15^th, 2007 Crysis—one of the most highly anticipated first-person shooters ever developed exclusively for the PC, was finally released. A technological marvel powered by Crytek’s next-generation CryENGINE 2 promising incredible visuals with unparalleled realism never seen in any game before it; intense combat with challenging and resourceful enemies where the player must constantly adapt their weaponry and hi-tech armor to survive. Crysis is poised to raise the bar and set the standard for all PC games to come. Today, we’ll take a critical look at just how well it lives up to these lofty ambitions.

Founded in 1999 by Cevat, Avni and Faruk Yerli, Crytek was a small, relatively unknown studio that took the gaming industry by surprise on March 23, 2004—long before id Software and Valve released DOOM³ and Half-Life 2. Crytek released a first-person shooter that cast the player in the role of retired Green Beret Jack Carver operating his one-man charter boat service in peace and quiet on the islands of Micronesia—until he takes photojournalist Valerie Constantine to one of the islands to photograph derelict WWII ships and other relics. Jack suddenly finds himself up to his neck in murderous mercenaries and horrific mutants as he tries to save himself and Valerie. Although the plot is straight out of a Saturday night B-movie, the shooter featured Crytek’s CryENGINE, which pushed existing hardware to the limit as it rendered an island paradise that was as breathtakingly beautiful as it was deadly, with multiple paths for the player to exploit and explore; lots of cool weapons, drivable vehicles, relentless and challenging enemies, and enough thrills, gunplay and pyrotechnics for a dozen Hollywood action movies. The name of the game was Far Cry. And the rest of course, is history.

Fast forward to the present, and Crytek's latest masterpiece Crysis—the most anticipated PC game of the year. In the year 2020 on the Lingshan Islands in the Philippines Sea, Dr. Rosenthal, his daughter Helena and their research team have uncovered something remarkable—and not of this Earth. Unfortunately for them, their discovery has also drawn the attention of North Korea. Led by General Kyong, the KPA (Korean People’s Army) stage a massive invasion of the island, and evacuates the entire civilian population. Dr. Rosenthal, Helena, the research team and their discovery are immediately placed under KPA “custody.”

In response, the U.S. dispatches the USS Constitution under Admiral Morrison to the region, with a full contingent of Marines led by Major Strickland. Rather than go in with guns blazing and run the risk of a full-scale international incident until the situation is fully assessed, JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) orders the carrier battle group to remain on standby and keep its distance, sending in Raptor Team—a squad of elite U.S. Army Delta Force Operators known only by their code-names—to “locate and evacuate” the Rosenthals and the researchers.

Crysis places you in the role of “Nomad,” a member of Raptor Team, which consists of "Prophet," the team leader; and “Psycho,” “Jester," and “Aztec,” your squadmates. Under the cloak of darkness and equipped with highly advanced Nanosuits designed to augment physical and battlefield capabilities, you parachute in—only to have your main and reserve chutes and your suit’s electronics fail after something does an unexpected fly-by. Fortunately, the water below softens your impact. The other members of the team aren’t having any better luck, though; it seems that everyone has missed the landing zone and are scattered all over the place. After swimming to the beach, Prophet reboots your Nanosuit to bring its systems back online. Dealing with a small KPA patrol, you come across Jester. Aztec is hung up in a tree not too far away, and Prophet orders the two of you to his aid.

Before you can reach Aztec, the same something that nearly got you killed during your jump has now found him and the KPA patrol that has closed on his position. The sound of gunfire, shouting and something inhuman that suddenly rips through the tropical night air like a dagger through a pounding heart—and Aztec’s terrified screams over your headset—drives home the fact that this "routine" covert rescue operation is no longer routine—and about to go FUBAR big-time. Your fears are confirmed when you find Aztec’s bloody corpse with an unforgettable expression of sheer horror frozen on his lifeless face, hanging from his parachute lines in a tree, and the mutilated bodies of the North Korean patrol nearby. After vaporizing Aztec’s body to prevent the North Koreans from gaining access to his Nanosuit’s technology, Prophet orders Jester to stay behind to recover Aztec’s gear, and you to the rendezvous point. Suddenly, both you and Jester hear that inhuman sound again…

In Crysis, the key to your survival is the Nanosuit—a technological marvel with abilities that are as unique as the “cyber-human” musculature of its appearance. The exoskeleton suit has four modes that give the operative wearing it a major tactical advantage on the battlefield against non-augmented opponents:

Strength—doubles your physical strength, allowing you to lift and throw heavy objects, jump higher, do more damage with melee attacks, and steady your aim with high-recoil weapons like the Sniper and Gauss Rifle. Sections of the Nanosuit glow red while this is active.

 

Speed—Enhances the player’s ability to move faster than normal. The Nanosuit glows yellow when Speed mode is activated.

 

Armor—Increases the Nanosuit’s resistance to ballistic weapons and other types of damage.

 

Cloak—Makes you and any selected weapon partially invisible for a short period of time. Disengages and automatically switches to Armor mode as soon as you initiate combat.

On the surface, it may seem like these abilities are gimmicky Sci-Fi cheats that unbalance gameplay, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, they add a major tactical element to the game that would not exist otherwise. First, you can only use one suit mode at a time. Second, your Nanosuit’s abilities require varying degrees of power. The more frequent and strenuous—or hazardous the activity you engage in with a Nanosuit augmentation activated, the faster that augmentation drains your suit’s energy. Running in Cloak mode drains your reserves faster than walking, or moving while crouched or prone—as does sprinting in Speed mode. Your energy reserves take an increasingly larger hit each time you jump or throw something in Strength mode. The more damage your Nanosuit soaks up, whether from gunfire or some other hazard, the faster your reserves deplete.

Once your Nanosuit’s energy reserves hits zero, any active augmentation shuts down. It takes roughly fifteen seconds for the energy reserves to recharge. Fifteen seconds can be a lifetime in combat—long enough for your Nanosuit to turn into a tailor-made hi-tech coffin. Learning to master the use of your Nanosuit and what it can and can’t protect you from, is key to the Adapt-Engage-Survive strategy that is central to playing Crysis.

The suit’s HUD (Heads-up Display) provides you with essential battlefield information. Updated in real-time via the JSOC satellite feed, your Tactical Radar in the lower left-hand corner displays a map of the immediate terrain surrounding you. The arrowhead in the center of the display represents the player. A Compass showing your current heading is located at the top, with an Enemy Alert Status bar on the left and Detection Indicator below it. Primary objectives appear as green dots on the map. Secondary objectives are yellow dots. Note that although it is not mandatory for you to complete secondary objectives to successfully complete missions in Crysis, it can make your life easier if you do. Friendlies are represented as blue arrowheads. Vehicles are gray rectangles. Hostiles are either yellow or red, depending on how aware they are of your presence. Friend or foe, the tip of the arrowheads always represents the direction they’re facing in relation to your position. If you suddenly find a group of red arrowheads pointing in your direction, you’ve got two choices: cloak and evade—or fight.

You’ll encounter a number of situations where the satellite feed from JSOC to your Tactical Radar will be disrupted by North Korean jamming stations. Whether you infiltrate the encampment where they are located and shut them down quietly; or give your Nanosuit and trigger finger a good workout by going in with guns blazing and blowing it and any KPA forces standing in your way straight to hell, you’ll need to take any jamming stations offline ASAP.

Ammunition remaining in the currently selected weapon, its magazine and number of currently selected grenades are in the lower right-hand corner. Below them are the Suit Energy, Player Health and Nanosuit Mode Indicators. Your Crosshairs or Targeting Reticule appears at the center of the screen and changes appropriately for the weapon selected, and dynamically based on firing accuracy. Objective updates are briefly displayed near the top of the screen after receiving them over your headset from either Prophet or Major Strickland. You can view your objectives on the Objectives Display and a larger Tactical Map which will be displayed on the left and right sides of the HUD. A Night Vision Power Indicator appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen whenever you turn it on. Using a separate power source from your suit, it doesn’t take long for it to drain before it needs to be recharged again, so you’ll have to use it sparingly. The Crysis Nanosuit is also equipped with a built-in breathing apparatus that kicks-in while you’re underwater, which thankfully doesn’t run out of power—literally a life saver if you happen to be in the water and need to hide out for awhile from KPA patrol boats and helicopters.

Crysis uses a really slick Suit Switching Mode Menu that pops up in center of the screen, allowing you to select your Nanosuit modes or the Weapon Modification Menu. If you have a gaming mouse with a thumb button, this feature is tailor-made for it. You can also press the <4> key or double-press certain command keys to toggle through the Nanosuit modes, provided Suit Shortcuts is enabled. Be advised that bringing up the Nanosuit and Weapons Modification menus, the Objectives Display and Tactical Map do not pause the action going on around you—so make sure you’re not being shot at before you use them.

Like Far Cry, Crysis was created from the ground-up as a PC game. You won’t find any awkward camera angles or counter-intuitive and inflexible keyboard and mouse button mapping schemes here. With the ability to lean and go prone as well as the usual range of movement found in first person shooters, you won’t feel as if Crytek deliberately set out to handicap and frustrate you at every turn the way some game studios do with poorly implemented console ports. All of the keys in Crysis can easily be re-mapped through the slick and very intuitive PDA-style menu system. And for those of you who prefer a gamepad over a mouse and keyboard, Crysis supports the Xbox 360 Controller (wired or wireless), provided you’ve downloaded and installed the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows software.

You’d expect a game like Crysis to give you a kick-ass selection of armaments to play with, and the game doesn’t disappoint. Although some of them are available only in multiplayer, you certainly won’t find yourself lacking while engaged in the single-player campaign. Though their names have been changed due to licensing restrictions, most of the weapons in Crysis are based on existing U.S./NATO and former Soviet-Bloc designs. The FY71 Assault Rifle used by the North Korean Forces is based on the well-known AK-47 and 74, while the pistols in the game are based on the Desert Eagle Magnum.

Weapons and ammo can be retrieved from the bodies of KPA soldiers and their various bases on the island. In the interest of realism, player loadout is restricted to a limited amount of ammo and explosives; a side arm, a primary and secondary weapon, and a three-shot-and-discard Portable Missile Launcher. Your Binoculars not only allow you to assess the battlefield situation from a safe distance, but they allow you to tag enemies and objectives to track on your Tactical Radar, and also uses an integrated microphone to hear whatever you’re zoomed-in on. At all difficulty levels except the highest, tagged enemies will display a green, yellow or red aura that indicates their level of combat awareness and alertness. On select missions, you can use the Binoculars to mark targets for air strikes launched from the USS Constitution.

One cool feature of Crysis is the ability to upgrade your weapons with different types of ammunition and attachments like Scopes, Silencers, Flashlights, Laser Pointers and Grenade Launchers. One particularly interesting attachment is the non-lethal Tactical Attachment, which allows you to fire an unlimited number of darts that knock out an enemy for 30 seconds. The downside is that it takes 30 seconds to prep and reload the next dart. Each weapon in the game has varying degrees of upgradability. The Precision Rifle which is a high-powered sniper rifle cannot use a silencer. Attachments are either found separately, or attached to an existing weapon. Picking up either automatically adds it to your inventory to be used on any supported weapon you may acquire later on. Attachments are managed through the Weapons Modification Menu.

Normally, a fists-only melee attack falls into the “last-resort” or “out-of-ammo-and-s***-out of luck” categories in first-person shooters. But with the enhanced strength of your Nanosuit, it can be quite effective. When you are close enough to an enemy whether you are cloaked or not, a Grab Enemy icon will briefly display in the middle of your screen. Pressing <Use> will allow you to grab him by the throat and choke him as you lift him off the ground—then hurl him through the air like a rag doll through a wall, off a cliff, or into other enemy soldiers. Of course if you’d rather do things the old-fashioned way, you can always use the butt of your weapon. That’s nowhere near as fun though, as grabbing a hapless KPA soldier and using him for a bullet shield, activating Strength mode, then hurling him into his comrades and knocking them all down like a bunch of bowling pins. Unquestionably the sweetest melee attack ever featured in a first-person shooter to date!

There will be times where the shortest distance between two points is a set of wheels, the sky—or a boat. Crysis allows you to commandeer Pickup Trucks, Hummers, APCs, Patrol Boats, Tanks, Helicopters (multiplayer only) and VTOL (Vertical Take-off and Landing) Jets, while using their armaments to ward off any attacks. The difficulty level you select to play Crysis at, determines whether or not, among other things, you can use the vehicle's weapons while operating it. The Crysis single-player campaign has four difficulty levels:

Like its predecessor Far Cry, Crysis uses a checkpoint saved game system which automatically triggers when you reach one of several possible points on the level on the way to an objective. While the checkpoint system in Far Cry was certainly better than the ones found in some PC games, it still drew fire from a lot of gamers who wanted the freedom of saving where and when they choose. Unlike some studios, Crytek actually listens to their audience. Which is why, in addition to checkpoints, Crysis also allows you to save and load your game wherever and whenever you want.

I think it’s always a good practice to make manual saves every now and then in the event that an autosave gets corrupted. Of course, it’s also great to have choices in a game; so if you want to manually save frequently, you can—and if relying on the checkpoints is good enough for you, fine. If there’s any real drawback to this approach, it’s that you can easily accumulate so many checkpoint and manual saves, it can actually take awhile for them to appear on the menu to select them. The solution is simple—spend a minute deleting the saved games that you don’t want. If you do it regularly or whenever you think the list of saved games is getting a bit long, so much the better.

Crytek set the standard for cinematic and photo-realistic “you-are-there” game worlds back in 2004 with Far Cry. With Crysis, not only have they raised the bar for what a truly immersive game world should look and feel like—they’ve pushed the bar into the stratosphere and shattered it! Bullets striking the ground and exploding grenades not only sends dirt flying into the air, but against the lenses in your Nanosuit's mask. You can almost feel the heat and smell the stench of burning metal from the roaring flames and oily, black smoke pouring from the charred carcass of a KPA tank destroyed by a missile. A hail of gunfire viciously cuts through trees and foliage like hundreds of white-hot sickles. Blood red laser pointers on weapons stab through the darkness and fog. Heavenly shafts of light piercing the thick canopy of trees, are disrupted by the rotor-wash of an enemy helicopter passing overhead. Lumbering sea turtles and scurrying crabs making their way across the moonlight washed sand of a beach while the dark waves of the ocean foam and lap at its shores. Cloaked as you attempt to sneak past a guard, your Nanosuit's faint, glassy ghost-like shimmer almost makes invisible—until the guard notices your shadow on the ground, unslings his rifle, and spins to face you with a startled shout...

Even more impressive, is the way CryENGINE 2 handles NPCs. Everything from facial expressions to hair that actually looks and moves like hair without a trace of clipping, is rendered with a level of detail and realism that was once the exclusive domain of tech demos used to showcase new video cards. Depth of field and motion blur may be nothing more than gimmicks in other games, but in Crysis they add a level of immersion and realism that you'd be hard pressed to find in other games. Motion blur is especially dramatic when you're using the Nanosuit's speed mode to evade attacks or close the distance between yourself and an enemy in a hurry. 

Many objects in the environment are destructible and can be interacted with. Toss a grenade into one of the island’s many weather-beaten make-shift shacks and you can literally bring the roof and walls down on top of any enemies inside. Vehicles have hit-specific damage and react accordingly. Shoot the tires on a pursuing KPA Hummer, and the rubber shreds and flies off in large chunks, either crippling or forcing the vehicle to crash. Driving a truck on its rims with heavy damage reduces its top speed and makes it harder to control. Ferocious jungle firefights shred surrounding foliage like confetti, sending splinters of bark, leaves—and splatters of blood, flying. Everything from bottles and sticks to oil drums, ammo crates and old boat motors can be picked up and tossed to create a distraction, or as an impromptu weapon.

It’s probably safe to say that at the present time, there probably isn’t any hardware combination widely available to the PC gaming public capable of running Crysis at widescreen resolutions of 1680x1050 or greater, with all of the visual effects maxed out with 4x or greater antialiasing while maintaining playable frame rates, so that the game can be run in all of its visual glory the way the developers at Crytek envisioned. Frustrating? Sure. Surprising? Hardly.

Three years ago, it took hardware, video drivers and game patches awhile to catch up and mature so that Far Cry could be played at the high resolutions of the day with all the eye-candy turned up, without the game running as fast as drying paint. Considering how incredibly complex Crytek’s CryENGINE 2 is, it stands to reason that the same will apply for Crysis. This means another round of upgrades to the latest-and-greatest processors and video cards when they become available sometime next year, perhaps even a commitment to 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit flavor of Windows. If you wanna run big, you gotta go big, which is nothing new in the bleeding-edge world of PC gaming.

That shouldn’t discourage you from playing and enjoying Crysis right-now, however. Crysis will scale with your current setup just fine. But unless you want the game to run like a slide show, you’ll definitely have to make some compromises on how high you can turn up the game’s phenomenal eye candy. You may also need to dial back your display's resolution a notch. If you're accustomed to running your games with 4x antialiasing or better, you may have to dial that back—or disable it—as well. The good news is, Crysis is still going to be an incredibly good-looking game. And once drivers and game patches are further optimized and the next-generation of hardware and processors are released, come down in price and you upgrade, Crysis will look and run even better.

Audio is another area where Crysis does not disappoint, whether you’re rocking a top-of-the-line 5.1 speaker system or a good set of headphones. First there’s the awesome soundtrack by renowned composer Inon Zur, whose powerful, sweeping and majestic scores have brought dozens of video games to life, such as SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALS, EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark, Men of Valor, and Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. Weapons fire and explosions pack an impressive punch, while the aliens are suitably other-worldly creepy. Dialog and voice acting are very good—much better than Far Cry—and the computerized voice that announces which Nanosuit mode is being activated, is pretty cool. You can choose the gender of the voice, or turn it off completely if you wish. The female voice is actually kind of bland—definitely no Cortana; while the male voice sounds a bit like James Earl Jones and has a bit more “attitude” which better matches the aggressive, hi-tech appearance of the Crysis Nanosuit.

In English, the KPA soldiers give plenty of verbal cues on whether or not you’ve been spotted, or they suspect you’re nearby, when they’re reloading and need covering fire, or attempting to flank you—and most importantly—if they are about to send a grenade or two your way. There’s also the obligatory taunts and a few foul-mouthed insults thrown in for good measure. Though their English is nowhere near as bad as the god-awful, racially stereotypical English spoken by Asian villains in other games, they do sound much better when speaking Korean—and it makes Crysis more realistic. (besides, I can usually tell when someone is trying to shoot my ass off whether it's in English or not). Fortunately, if you aren’t up to playing the game at Delta difficulty level (and believe me—it is brutal), you can edit the Easy, Normal or Hard difficulty level config files so that the KPA speaks Korean by default:

Now all of the North Korean troops with the exception of General Kyong (who always speaks English, regardless), will speak in Korean.

I played Crysis on the following system:

Default NVIDIA Control Panel Settings for Crysis Profile with the following exceptions:

- Anisotropic filtering: 16x

- Antialiasing – Transparency: Multisampling

- Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off

- Triple buffering: On

- Vertical sync: Force on

Here are my visual settings in Crysis:

Using FRAPS Version 2.9.2 Build 6725, I averaged 20 -45 frames per second depending on how much was going on at any given time. While I didn’t get the 60 frames per second I normally shoot for and like to see, Crysis looked and played great will few slowdowns or hitching as I played through the single-player campaign. The game was very solid—no lockups or crashes to the desktop. The only time Crysis gave me any real grief in terms of performance, was the final battle at the end of the game, where the frame rates fell into the single-digits. I had to reduce all of the visual settings to Medium to make the final segment of the game playable. Hopefully updated drivers from NVIDIA and the announced Crysis patch will fix this.

I also tried the Crysis DirectX 9 Hack, which reportedly increases the visual quality of the game to that of DirectX 10 under Windows Vista, without the insane performance hit. Sounds too good to be true, but there was only one way to find out…

There are two ways of performing the hack. The first method is here, and the second here. Let's look at some actual gameplay screenshots showing the differences with default settings and the hack. All screenshots were taken at 1920 x 1200 resolution.The default setting screenshots are on the left, and the ones with the Crysis DirectX 9 Hack (I used the CVAR files method), are on the right:

In the first set of screenshots, at the top, notice how much sharper the textures are, particularly on the metal fences alongside the road, and the rocks in the background. Also notice that the leaves in the trees have more definition. The tire tracks on the road have more definition as well.

The second set of screenshots show an ever more dramatic difference. Notice how “flat” the sky and clouds look the screenshot on the left that represents the default setting. Now look at the one on the right with the hack enabled. Not only does the sky look more natural and the clouds have more depth, but notice the sun’s rays and slight halo effect around the tree. In both instances, the screenshots taken with the hack exhibit more of a natural color than the overly saturated "picture postcard" look of the screenshots without it.

I should point out that the visual enhancements provided by the hack are not true DirectX 10 effects (though they still look very nice). As explained by Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli during a recent question-and-answer session he participated in with NVIDIA’s VP of Content Relations Roy Taylor:

cw: Why is it that 'Very High' features can be enabled in DX9 through a 'hack' of sorts, yet are unavailable normally?

 

Cevat: The game was in the earliest days before we could ship DX10 hardware obviously developed around DX9. So, during the development process some of the DX10 effects were simulated in DX9. So what some users are seeing is some of the material used to develop the DX10 effects but these are NOT DX10. Only by running the game in Vista and using the DX10 API can you get the true maximum experience and of course we have no guarantees for the game's stability if it's hacked (my emphasis).

The complete transcript that contains the above quote can be read here.

While I didn’t experience any major stability issues using the hack, I did experience more chugging throughout the game than I did without the hacked CVAR files. Your actual results with this method of pumping up the visual quality in Crysis will undoubtedly vary. If you do try it, don’t forget to back up any files you modify—and your saved games, just to be safe.

Crysis offers several online and a LAN-based multiplayer modes with support for up to 32 players for each one over nine different maps, ranging from small to large to support different-sized teams. The multiplayer browser has the same slick, easy to read and use PDA-style interface as the rest of the game’s main menu system. Once you log-in, you’ll be presented with a number of filtering options, such as Punkbuster, Dedicated, DirectX 10 and Gamepad Only servers; which type of game you want to play, and so on. With the included server component, you can run your own Crysis DirectX 10 or DirectX 9 server. A Crysis DirectX 10 server can host Crysis clients running either DirectX 9 or 10, scaling itself accordingly, while a Crysis DirectX 9 server can only host Crysis PCs running under DirectX 9.

Clients connected to a Crysis DirectX 10 server will also be able to experience day-to-night transitions (provided the feature is enabled on the server), along with the same environmental and vehicle physics in the Crysis single-player campaign—neither of which will be available on Crysis DirectX 9 servers—though vehicle and specific structure physics will remain intact, and maps can be modded with the Sandbox2 Editor to show different times of day or night.

In addition to the weapons and vehicles found in the single-player campaign, there are certain weapons, vehicles and equipment that are available for use only through multiplayer—like Helicopter Gunships, Repair Torches for fixing damaged vehicles and Electronic Lockpicks for stealing enemy vehicles; the Nano Disruptor Grenade that temporarily shorts out any Nanosuit functionality within its blast radius, friend or foe; and the Molecular Accelerator and Arrestor Attachment ice weapons based on technology used by the aliens.

Selecting Quick Game from the Main Menu under Multiplayer automatically connects you to a populated server with the lowest-possible ping times for your system, in a classic “every-man-for-himself” deathmatch battle—made all the more interesting and intense thanks to the augmented Nanosuit capabilities (a number of Quick Game options can be adjusted to your liking under OptionsàGame Settings on the menu). Internet Game allows you to search for a server or create your own for Internet play, while selecting Local Network Game lets you do the same thing over a LAN. The Quick and Internet Game multiplayer modes require a GameSpy account (which you can create during the installation of Crysis if you don’t already have one).

Of course, no matter how next-gen the visuals, how many kick-ass weapons are at your disposal, or how amped-up the gameplay is by giving you hi-tech armor that enhances your strength, speed, resistance to gunfire and allows you to cloak yourself, at the end of the day deathmatch in Crysis is still the same “been-there-done-that” deathmatch that’s been in practically every first-person shooter since Day One. The challenge is how to make it a little more interesting or unique than the other game’s deathmatch. To really kick multiplayer up a notch above and beyond what you’d normally find in a first-person shooter, Crytek created Power Struggle Mode—the pinnacle of the Crysis multiplayer experience which skillfully blends strategy with all-out, run-and-gun team deathmatch and capture-the-flag—on steroids!