Crysis Review: Continued

Crytek use their own game engine, called CryENGINE2. In fact this is big upgrade of the original CryENGINE, designed for FarCry. CryENGINE2 is one of the first engines that can use the full DirectX 10 capabilities under Windows Vista. The engine includes physical, graphical, and animation technologies, some of which are listed below:

• real time maps with dynamic lighting and real-time shadows
• sunrise and sunset effects
• subsurface scattering (when light penetrates the surface of a translucent objects)
• skeletal animation
• 3D ocean technology based on wind and wave direction and moving shadows and lights underwater
• physics showcasing vegetation responding to wind, rain or character movement
• realistic human animation (e.g. adapting to uneven terrain, eye tracking, facial animation, leaning when running around corners, natural motion transitions)
• fully interactive and destructible surroundings
• and many more...

The story of Crysis is not the only thing from the future. The game hardware demands are also from the future - even with best current video cards, the game can not be played comfortably with very high settings, especially on larger screen resolutions. Occasionally the game freezes for few seconds and the number of the frames per second decreases dramatically when there are a lot moving objects. If you turn the quality down to get acceptable speed the visuals remain stunning, but not perfect. The light and shadow effects are pretty good but not without some problems. For example, a human shadow falling partially on other person looks real but it has rough edges.

The face animation is a important part of the game physics engines. Here it realized at very high level (big improvement over FarCry in this area). A totally new and innovative element it the free hair movement. This can be seen in two stages of the game. Actually, I tried to remember where I've seen something like this. And the answer was: the movie Final Fantasy. It seems that 6 year later the real-time animation is finally getting close to the animation used in cinema. In a lot of animated movies one of the main problems is the eyes. Their motion, as well as their appearance are still a hard task. The Crysis developers made big progress about this issue. As a result of this, the people in the game have almost very believable facial movements and expressions.

The movements of the humans is satisfactory. Both in close and in remote distance their movements are very real when they run, shoot or just walk. As for the AI, sometimes the soldiers are not acting very smart. If you shoot them, hidden behind bushes or tree, they can remain with back to you until they die. Sometimes they react logically and start looking for you but in the most cases they just watch from their posts.

Instead of the pigs in FarCry, here in Crysis there are domestic hens, wild turkeys, shoals, tortoises and lobsters. All of them have actual appearance and behavior. Most objects can be taken from the player. If you want, you can take a book from the shelf or a tortoise from the beach. Other options of the physics engine are the snow and rain effects, also the effects of earthquake and storm. The earthquake is not implemented very well, unlike the rain and the snowfall. The rain and snowfall representations are one of the best so far.

The vehicles reflect correctly the movement of these of the real world. The cars are easier to drive then the jeeps and they on their hand are easier then the tanks and heavy trucks. If they are damaged, the control is much harder and the vehicle eventually explodes. In addition, you have to be careful through the mine fields. They can be find in front of the korean barricades and the player does not have a dismantle device. The must be detonated from distance.

The sound effects of explosions are impressive. The sounds of breaking of branches, also of swimming and piloting the plane sound real. In Crysis there are a lot of various soundtracks. All of them have created by Inon Zur. Games as Syberia II , Prince of Persia: the two thrones, and Star Trek: starfleet command: Orion pirates are also partially done by this composer. The dialogs are relatively well formed. Voice acting is nicely done with various accents.

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