I seriously dreaded when the day came to sit down and write this. As I sat at the keyboard poised to type, the one thing I wanted to do, was to stay away from taking about looks. After all looks can be deceiving, in the case of Medusa if you were to look upon her face, you would turn to stone. If you look at an egg, it looks appealing, but when you taste, it’s just a fart made into something solid.

So as far as looks go, I’m leaving that till later but believe it or not I want to take all on a journey through time, to the not too distant future, where man have perfected the ultimate combat machine. A suit which on command, will give you strength of the bear, speed of the puma, and armour of…a really hard thing. (I didn’t pay attention to Bravestarr that much.)

At least that’s how I saw it when the intro video, it seemed to be a sales pitch for the suit that does it all, maximum strength this and maximum egg whisking that. Lots of things blow up, you kill at a faster rate than ever before and if it went on for much longer, we would have seen George Foreman endorsing it, saying “I kick ass, and the suit also gets me these!” with lovely women in bikinis walking on screen asking George if he would be the father of their kids. I’ll take one then.

Now I can hear you all cry, “Paul, you are the fountain of all knowledge and all history books should be re-written to tell of your epic tales of courage and valour. But great one, what suit are you on about? Have Marks and Spencer brought out something new for Christmas?”

Fear not, for the mystery is not that troublesome. I had been putting this off for a while and now the time has finally come for the Lord of Leisure’s play through the game, Crysis.

Crysis, ever since it was announced ages ago (the time when everything was still black & white, and people still went to work using their penny farthings.) got people sitting up and noticing. So many expect great things from the makers of another ye olde game known as Far Cry, and we were basically believing this is the second coming of digital Jesus.

So let’s see if we should be giving money to the church of Crysis and singing hallelujah…

Before you even start the game, the difficulty level does present something which is interesting, as the level rises, you get less help, and the most interesting one is that on Delta, the North Koreans speak Korean. How dare they, Koreans speaking Korean, what will they think of next?

As for plot, you play some bloke in the fancy suit in the year 2020 that is going to a place with other people in the same suits, one of which is proper British and the only one who wants to truly swear lots because it’s all silly. You are to rescue some stupid people who seem to only want to go to islands where evil North Koreans want to have for themselves and do naughty. This is why we have international incidents so as a result for the rest of the review, they are now known as “Stupids”.

I do wonder if it was a toss-up between Naughty North Koreans or Naughty Al-cucumber blow-up people as it appears these are the only evil people left in terms of bad guys. Unless you count Sweden. They’re lying in wait, posed for the right moment…

Anyway, to reach the island, you jump out of a plane and things go a bit wrong on the way down and you end up all by yourself. Dash it all. So you meet up with your friend after despatching a couple of stragglers on the beach and then you hear over the radio thing you have somewhere on your person, that another one of your mates are in deepest darkest brown stuff.

You get there and there isn’t much left. This starts making it more interesting from the start, something more to this again, but for some reason this is dismissed by your commanding bloke who vaporises the dead guy and you move on. Someone was killed in a horrible manner and that doesn’t matter. Never mind.

Moving on, the early game play seems to play out like a game of chess, takes far too long and if you don’t sneak about hiding, using the fantastic “I’m so glad it’s there, thank you various gods” cloaking device on your uber suit and popping the bad guys off one at a time, you expose yourself to an attack, you die, they will have had the queen and buggered the bishop.

it seems the North Korean health plan must be excellent as the enemy has terrific vision. With their refined senses, they hone in on you like nobody’s business and they do tend to be very accurate with gun fire. Also you kill one or two of the blighters, and the rest of them come charging for you, forcing you to run and hide again. Later on, they even have crappier versions of your suit and damned miniguns to provide a challenge, though they haven’t read the manuals on how the suits work it seems.

So the enemy is good to fight, as you can’t go and just shoot at them blindly. You have to think about how you kill. Good stuff, I may get annoyed at the enemy but it has kept me coming back. But this intelligence seems to only extend to the outdoors.

Indoors, one such example I recall running around a village where the naughty Koreans are holding one of the “Stupids”, they seem to turn into a bunch of useless gimps who seems to be more than happy to run into your line of fire and shout “Take me now, you magnificent manly brute!” One pile of bodies later….

And I have to say that using the vehicles in the game is only slightly less painful than having your foot ran over by a JCB. Try to drive anywhere at speed other than in a straight line is close to impossible and being honest, use them as a battering ram when needed and just run everywhere else. Tanks are nice though but again during those sections you end up driving past everything. The plane section is silly as you are better off only killing the bad guys that are directly in your line of sight, and just making a run for it.

So you are best off on foot then. That is, if the objective is only a few hundred metres away. It seems the further you got in the game, the further away everything was, and the game seems hell bent on throwing ever more Koreans at you, even taking the trouble of keeping helicopters chasing you and hovering over you even when you are cloaked. And for good measure, even more Koreans are thrown in your path, at times you just wonder if anyone is actually left in North Korea at this point. (We’ve all gone to war, leave a message after the beep.)

And all this happens despite the appearance of a strange blue thing swiping members of your team on more than one occasion and leaving you behind. What? Do I smell or something? And it’s the alien parts that make the game far more interesting than battling 1000 trillion naughty people, it seems when the aliens come about, you get a lot more plot to drive you on which is a slight change from reach this area, disable this, kill them blah blah.

I am sounding like a broken record right now, having basically just summed up the opening part of the game as run, shoot and hide, repeating as you go. At times, Crysis feels like you are playing Splinter Cell, which I do happen to like by the way, because being honest without the cloak option on your suit, you are dead.

You have to hide ¾ of the time in Crysis due to overwhelming odds, it does make you think more, I grant you, using the landscape around you, but at the same time it will make think about murdering the population of an entire village in real life for stress relief.

The aliens in Crysis are pretty nasty and it appears they have plans, maybe they blow a few things up later, but first you must wander through their home, which has some freaky elements to it when moving about. The lack of gravity is a nice touch and when you reach the outside world again, they have started to turn it into a frozen tropical paradice. That is when you start liking the game good and proper. Fair play to Crytek, at last something truly great. And you do get some epic battles to fight through, each more grand than the last. When you start firing, that’s when the man juice flows.

But the main, and perhaps for some geeks who use games like this instead of having flesh and blood girlfriends, the only reason to have this game is the Graphics. See why I waited to write about the looks? It has been the first thing remarked on by every review I have seen on Crysis so far, and you have to see if the gameplay is good first before having the graphics engine come in play.

Frankly…Wow. They are spectacular, and this is one of the reasons why I bought the Geforce 8800 GTS. The views are stunning, when you have time to admire them that is, the vegetation all around looks quite realistic, though saying that there’s too much of the damned stuff at times to see where you are going.

The best outdoor scene for me was when things were frozen after the aliens started doing naughty. Superb, and anyone can see why Crysis won the best graphics award from Spike TV. The motion blur, makes it look even better, now some people don’t like the blur, but actually it makes it more interesting and stops you from rushing around too much. The splatters of mud and ice on your visor again give the view something more special and adds elements to combat. Indeed in terms of graphics, we have a 12 of the weird score system employed here at ooh sometimes.

But that is only if you have one hell of a beefy system. We are talking top of the range quad-core processors, with crossfired or SLIed graphics systems, tons of memory and a fast hard disk to boot and even then that is no guarantee of playing at uber high resolutions. The demo played fine on the uber beast system here, but the full game, is damned near unplayable at the same high resolutions, meaning for most of time I dropped to the DirectX 9 mode playing at 1024 x 768. And even then at times, the main action stuttered badly.

My thoughts are: what a load of crap. I just paid all the money in the world for an uber beast of a machine to find that when it comes to this game, the best I can do is stuttering at lower settings? I do smell a bit of work needed here to optimise the game still, and this surely is evident by the upcoming patch.

So after all this muttering what do we have?

• Hordes of Koreans
• Even more Koreans
• More Koreans after the first two lots.
• Enemy AI is for the most part, really tough and does provide a hell of a challenge. (But just find a house, bring `em in, and waste `em. Numpties.)
• Vehicles are pants. My Ford Fiesta handles better. Enough said.
• Graphics are fantastic. No doubts there.
• But the system requirements are frankly enough to run a small country.
• Game and story only really gets going with the aliens doing naughty.

And really I do have to say this; you do in fact get some satisfaction in playing the game if only to get to the good bit, before that, there is a good chance you will put the game down and go to the pub. Which is what I did.

Multiplayer is…well I don’t know, Being honest, it’s like most other shooters with the silly vehicles still dogged with the handling of a walrus. I gave up on the multiplayer and went back to Team Fortress 2 instead. That runs like a dream, and until the performance issues are looked at here, the amount of stutter puts me off trying any further.

So Crysis is good. I really do like it despite all the criticism in the review. It is far more favoured than Far Cry was, as at least with this game you can make progress and not be stopped at the first enemy you meet due to the difficulty. Indeed there were many good moments, when you just think, that’s neat. I can’t say about one particular moment, because of plot, but suffice to say frozen people makes it more than just a bog standard shooter, despite that element being here in force for the big fight scenes.

Crysis made me come back for more, but at the same time, put me off playing off playing it too much. A most strange combination.

Rating:
And of course, using the outstandingly amazing 1-10 system (where 1 is complete nuts while 10 is the dog’s nuts, with 12 being given for nuts of unquestioning perfection) I hereby award the game:

It’s got a lot going for it, it really has. Graphics get a 12, no question on that score. But far too many enemies you end up running away from, poor performance and the vehicles let it down, which is a great shame and it pains me to give this a 7. I can only imagine I will be called a philistine for this score.