Crysis Review: Introduction

Mariyana Vasileva April 22, 2008

Far Cry and Crysis are the only „children“ of the game development company Crytek but each of them caused well deserved hype. Both of worlds lead the player into the deep and thick forests of the islands in visually stunning adventures. Both claim to be Sci-Fi, but Far Cry mainly offers us action (with the exception of the mutant monsters), while Crysis develops the Sci-Fi elements much more ambitiously. The company announced that the game will be the first FPS game from a planned trilogy. In connection with this the company is in the process of trademarking of the titles Crysis Wars, Crysis Annihilation, and World in Crysis.

Like each high quality FPS product, the game contains a large quantity of weapons, exciting and dynamic missions as well as detailed and real created outdoor and indoor areas. One of most important special features of Crysis is that it is not entirely linear as most of the games in the genre. The huge and varied woods, grassy marshes, waterfalls, steep roads and sheer cliffs are all part of scenes where the game's action is laid. The main character (a soldier with alias Nomad) could easily become lost in the jungle whenever he has a malfunction in his navigation system. Additionally there are various types of buildings, transport and military vehicles (trucks, cars, boats, jeeps, fictional flying vehicles, called vtols, helicopters, carriers, tanks) and ... aggressive aliens.

The game prehistory sounds intriguing. American archaeologists find an odd artifact on an island in the South China Sea in 2020. The government of North Korea learns about that and they occupy the area. The U.S. government answers with an attack by a company of Special Forces. The primary mission of the american soldiers is locate and rescue the scientists. But at some time it becomes clear that the artifact is of alien origin. At one stage, the battle turns into three-way against both the North Korean military forces and against aliens. Aliens who are intelligent and armed with hi-tech weapons and equipment. Their goal is going to occupy the Earth and transform it into an ice desert.

The player and his mates have both traditional and futuristic weaponry. All mandatory guns, submachine guns, launcher, precision rifle have enhancements as silencer, grenade launcher attachment, reflex sight, and laser pointer. The last is not very useful because it gives away the location of the shooter. If you need more firepower, you have three types of grenades: frag, flashbang, and smoke grenades. Last but not least of arm weapons are the explosive charges. And this is only the beginning - the jeeps, the trucks, the tanks, as well as the boats have heavy machine guns or large caliber guns with endless number of shells and they are very useful when the koreans came in numbers. And finally, in the air, the vtols and the helicopters are really powerful and yes, you will have to pilot them!

Very important part of the game is the modular tactical exoskeleton or the nanosuit. It includes a few regimes: speed, camouflage, power, and armor and it increases the natural physical qualities of the protagonist,. The mask of the suit have a head-up display that shows its current condition and the co-ordinates for every mission. Besides these options, the nanosuit have built-in appliances like two-way radio and PDA (personal digital assistant).

Since the game have a real-time progression from day to night, the option night vision finds good application. Both the binoculars and the night vision device have screen with horizontal lines and the binoculars have much less zoom capabilities than in FarCry, which makes the game a bit harder but more realistic.

Crysis gives us much more then a casual action in tropical island. Because somewhere below the ground there is a huge complex with the captured scientists trapped in it. The player will save only one of them and after that he or she is going to get submerged into the weird world of alien creatures. They look like prolonged octopuses and swim easy in their weightless surroundings. This surroundings provokes feelings of horror and the gameplay gains other dimensions. Sharp ice crystals, narrow and maze tunnels, equipments and devices from metal alloys (or similar to metals), transparent monitors with mysterious symbols on them and greenish-blue invaders are a part of the surroundings. This complicated foreign world is completely different then the typical game environment. But it is also so exciting.

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