Crysis Review: Extraordinary but Flawed Masterpiece

The Crysis PC game is magnificently rendered, with breathtaking graphics, but this first-person shooter has some quirks that leave it just short of perfection.

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Introduction
See our slide show of the Crysis game
Stop the presses: Everything you've heard about Crysis is true. It's a first-person shooter game that features a massive Lost-like island to explore, revealing it in naturally occurring areas that can take several minutes to sprint through and hours to fully experience.
Crysis simulates that island and its tropical ecology by employing visual technology so sophisticated that bullets fired through sun-streaked foliage cause leaves to shiver, while massive explosions thousands of meters away can produce clouds of dust that settle gradually over jungle canopies like smog.
Remarkably, everything in Crysis is interactive, from coffee cups and barrels to destructible shacks to the trunks of felled trees, which you can pick up and wield.
Your opponents, organized around the island in organic detachments, are not only tactically devious but work together with uncanny efficiency. And even without a gun, you're a lethal weapon, kitted out with special nanotechnology that lets you hit, run, and jump like a superhero. Developer Crytek promised something that would "move the shooter genre forward substantially," and with Crysis, it is firing on all cylinders.
Crytek has also produced something of a flawed masterpiece. Your enemies are smart, but only to the extent that they play better hide-and-seek. Rules that apply to you are occasionally broken by the creators to ramp up a challenge, violating the game's internal logic and creating some of the most unnecessarily irritating moments in the story. And at the eleventh hour, the game's much-touted sense of openness gives way to a design that narrows as you advance, culminating in a final battle where someone barks orders at you like a drill sergeant reading a grocery list.
That is not to say Crysis isn't exceptional, and often extraordinary. But appreciating what it offers--an unconventional "emergent" adventure in an unspeakably beautiful setting--depends primarily on how you choose to engage it.
Paradise Vast
For instance, if you want a sophisticated story, or as lead designer Jack Mamais put it when I interviewed him in early 2006, "an experience equivalent to seeing an Oscar-nominated film," forget it. Crysis is long on bullets and short on plot. You're a member of U.S. Delta Force who is HALO-dropped onto an equatorial island to rescue a team of archaeologists who have been kidnapped by the North Korean military. Battling across the island, you eventually encounter a much-hyped plot twist, which is only ever vaguely explained. There--now you know as much about the story as I do having finished it.
Then again, in a game like Crysis the story isn't told to you so much as by you. In other shooters, invisible trip wires trigger events; only when you move past a threshold in Doom or Call of Duty or Gears of War do the bad guys pop out. That's rarely the case in Crysis, where the trip wire is you, picking your own time and trigger points, shaping approaches into outcomes instead of robotically reacting to predetermined surprises.
In one mission, for instance, you might crouch on a hilltop peering with binoculars at a small fishing village in a valley half a click below. Soldiers smoke and stub out cigarettes, wax their cars, march off patrol perimeters, perch in guard towers, salute superior officers--even unzip by the river to answer nature's call.
Your goal is to infiltrate the area and download intelligence from a laptop on the second floor of a heavily guarded building in the center. Do you sneak building to building without killing anyone? Assault the entire village, including reinforcements potentially summoned by flares from outposts kilometers up the road? Set traps using claymores and explosive charges to lure first responders to their doom? Creep behind patrols and drag soldiers away one by one? Attach C4 to jeeps and trucks, or ride them blazing into buildings housing enemy squads, leaping out at the last minute? Swim under and hijack dockside riverboats, and then strafe the village with their high-powered machine guns? All possible in this game, and just a handful of possible approaches.


Suiting Up
Part of that flexibility depends on your arsenal, and Crysis outfits you with plenty of guns, plus a sophisticated "rail" system with which you can attach upgrades such as laser pointers, silencers, flashlights, grenade launchers, reflex or sniper scopes, and more. Ballistics and weapon physics make mismatches possible, which encourages experimentation. Fire an AK-47 at a distance, and you might as well be honking a horn; pop a sniper scope on a jumpy submachine gun, and your view will jerk the length of the screen each time you fire.
Curiously, the most powerful weapon in the game isn't one you hold, but instead something you wear from the start: a nanosuit that can redirect energy to different parts of your body with a click, augmenting such attributes as strength, speed, and defense or temporarily rendering you invisible. The trick? Managing the drain and automatic recharge rates for each ability.
The suit is powerful enough, in fact, that you could play the bulk of Crysis conventional-weapons-free. Charge into melee shielded, grab enemies by the throat and fling them off cliffs, employ your cloaking ability to stalk and head-pop soldiers with your pistol, even grab at-hand objects and use them to bludgeon opponents. You haven't really played Crysis until you've gone on a clobbering spree with a saucepan.
Smart and Smarter
Designers fret over freeform games because their ability to predict AI behavior goes out the window. Not a problem (or less so) in Crysis.
Enemy soldiers function as well alone as they do in squads, responding to sound or motion and probing in groups instead of suicidally investigating solo. In firefights, teams deftly flank and assault, moving expertly between cover points and doggedly attempting to ring you with enfilade fire. The Korean People's Army (KPA) you're battling over most of the game is never less than crackerjack.
In contrast, the enemies you fight toward the end (which I won't spoil here) may look indelibly cool and at least initially put up a decent fight, but by the end of the game they're all flex and no finesse, turning winning into pattern recognition. It's a bummer that the eeriest bad guys are also the dumbest, but if you're familiar with Crytek's last game, Far Cry, you probably saw that one coming.
The only other problem is the KPA's seeming apathy to events unfolding in the broader scheme of things. There's a point midway through the game where events start to go wrong in...well, let's just say an "environmental" sense. The AI just ambles around like it's another sunny day in the South Pacific, which can be a little surreal when, comparatively speaking, you're picking your jaw up off the table.


Maximum Multiplayer
Supporting up to 32 players on a map, Crysis ships with two basic multiplayer modes. "Instant Action" is effectively a kill-or-be-killed (deathmatch) setup and useful mostly for getting acquainted with different weapons and tactics (if that sounds obvious, it's not--the nanosuit changes everything).
"Power Struggle," by contrast, takes Battlefield-style theater objectives (e.g., destroy the enemy's base) and weds them to a sophisticated resource-control tactic that has teams jockeying for control of alien energy at crash sites, which in turn feed prototype centers that yield advanced weapons and vehicles.
You start with just a pistol, but over time you can spend points accrued by scoring kills or holding key points to buy better weapons. It's all intensely team-driven, and perfect for players who enjoy large maps and sessions that can last for hours as map control seesaws. When the nukes come out (yes, nukes), Power Struggle may entail the giddiest iteration of "pile on" play yet seen in a PC game.


Flawed Masterpiece
It's tempting to give Crysis a pass for all it gets right, but you learn more from what a game doesn't do well.
Take the game's extremely advanced 3D engine. Crysis looks like something that had to be time-warped back from a future where average PCs can actually run it. The bad news is, average PCs today can't. You can ignore the game's already steep "minimum requirements" and use its more realistic recommended list as your baseline, which for a lot of folks means that the cost to play this game probably just went up by hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Occasionally you'll encounter sequences in the game where a helicopter flies in and chases you through the jungle or around a village. Trouble is, while land-based opponents are as hindered as you are by terrain and flora, enemy helicopters are inexplicably omniscient, leading to sequences where you'll be chased with preposterous accuracy around trees, rocks, and cliffs, whether you're cloaked or hidden stock-still. Having helicopters run search sweeps over broad areas would have been a better compromise than giving the pilots x-ray vision.
The most serious problem, though, is the way Crysis starts in kilometer-size jungle areas but ends on a claustrophobic aircraft carrier, complete with "Sorry, that's locked, you shall not pass!" doors and blocked-off passageways. After a depressingly conventional end sequence, you have to fight the obligatory super-size-me "boss" yoked to gimmicky patterns to which you must react or die. To be fair, the later levels work fine on their own--they just feel out of place in this game after so many hours of tactical spontaneity.


Best Shooter? Who Cares?
Everyone wants to experience the genre-defining game. Crysis isn't that title, but it is a marked improvement over the ideas its designers danced around but failed to realize years ago in Far Cry. Whether it's the best shooter in a year packed with benchmark raisers comes down to whether you take your story strong with lots of narrative hand-holding (that's another game, and it's called BioShock) or you prefer making it up as you go along in bullet-tattooed vehicles among toppled trees and methodically bulldozed villages.



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