Game Review (Retrospective): Crysis
In 2011, Electronic Arts removed their library of games from Steam, in favor of their own digital platform Origin. Recently, EA returned to Steam, and I thought this would be the perfect time revisit 2007’s Crysis and see if it was as good as I remembered. Short answer: it’s better.
If you’ve never played it, Crysis is a first person shooter that emphasizes tactics and planning, in large open sandbox style maps. You play as Nomad, a US special forces member whose unit has been tasked with rescuing a team of archeologists who have been captured by the North Korean military on a fictional island in the Philippines. The game’s signature feature is Nomad’s “nanosuit” which allows the player to switch between four different modes. Armor mode gives the player extra protection against damage, and the player is going to spend the majority of their time in this mode. Strength mode lets players punch extra hard, pick up large objects to either move or throw, and jump extra high to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Speed mode increases the players speed, and gives the player access to intense bursts of speed while sprinting. Stealth mode gives the player adaptive camouflage, effectively making the player invisible to enemies. Each mode uses energy when in use, but the camouflage mode is the only mode that uses energy even when not moving, giving your invisibility a timer. The other three modes, as long as you don’t actively use them (or in Armor’s case, when you’re not being damaged), the energy meter will recharge.
The different nanosuit functions give some truly diverse methods of play. My preferred approach was sneaking through most combat situations, only killing where necessary. The Stealth mode gives you enough time to sneak from rock to tree, and then uncloak long enough to recharge your energy. Enemies aren’t static, and the AI doesn’t just stay on predetermined paths. I found myself in some tense moments where an enemy soldier wandered too close for comfort to where I was hiding, waiting for my cloaking device to recharge. The game doesn’t allow you to stick to just one method though, forcing the player to use different tactics. At one point, I was in a three story building, surrounded by two tanks and a large group of soldiers and sneaking out of the building was not an option. Instead, I lured soldiers in to engage them on the stairs, switching between cloaked and armor mode to catch them by surprise while they were forced to bunch up in the stairwell. Strength mode let me leap from roof to roof while I shot rockets at the tanks. Speed mode was vital in retreating once the tanks closed on my position. Crysis is open ended enough that the player can usually stick to their preferred play style, but mastery of all abilities is going to be needed to get through those specific areas that really challenge the player.
Crysis also handles weapons in a way that I love, and have seen very rarely in games before or since. You begin play with a pistol and SCAR assault rifle, and over the course of the majority of the game, you’ll also be able to pick up an AK style assault rifle, a shotgun, a high powered rifle, and a sub-machine gun. Other, more advanced weapons are available occasionally, like the missile launcher, and in the game’s third act, more powerful weapons become more common, like the gauss rifle. However, while the selection of weapons is small, the game stands out due to its customization. Whenever a weapon with a different modification is found, that modification becomes available to any weapon you equip in the future. Combining this feature with fire mode
selection means that the weapons you carry upgrade without changing the base weapon. You don’t have to choose between seven different assault rifles. You just need to customize the one to fit your needs. As a side note, I also have to give Crysis credit for their treatment of shotguns, and every other game in existence could take a page from it’s book. The shotgun allows the player to tighten or loosen the choke, giving a narrower or wider spread. This is the only game I’ve played where the shotgun is still effective further than 6 feet. It has as close to a realistic effective range as possible, and more games should follow suit.
Playing a thirteen year old game, i was prepared to laugh at graphics that seemed hyper realistic at the time but are now outdated, but Crysis’ graphics still hold up incredibly well. The vegetation feels lush, the character models look and move realistically, and the water looks great, and the explosions have the weight and power that feels real. Even with modern graphics to compare it to, the game design manages to use the engine they had to make some truly stunning visuals.
Crysis is not perfect. There are some places where either limitations on AI or development fall short. One example was a scene where you’re in a boat, racing down a river, and a helicopter chases after you. At one point, I leapt out of the moving boat while cloaking and swam to shore and made my way down river on foot. Despite the fact that I was cloaked, the helicopter stayed overhead no matter which direction I went. It was frustration that the helicopter seemed to be rubber banded to my position, instead of flying around trying to locate me. The other thing where this game suffers is its difficulty curve. Once you’ve mastered your abilities, normal soldiers are fairly easy to pick off, and will go down with a single headshot even on the hardest difficulty. About halfway through Crysis, the difficulty gets ramped up exponentially, when you have to face off against four nanosuit wearing enemies who have all the same abilities you do. There is no gradual increase in difficulty. You are forced to kill all four enemies before the game will move on, and the nanosuit enemies can absorb a significant amount more damage. The game’s difficulty jumps up again in act three in a similar way, and in both instances, if you haven’t found a good strategy to fight these new enemies, you’ll be reloading your autosave over and over until you get it right. That being said, once I did figure out the difficulty curve, it was immensely satisfying. Figuring out when a nanosuit wearing enemy would be at their most vulnerable, and then surprising them one at a time before cloaking and disappearing from sight felt great.
The other downside is really a downside, but just a lost opportunity. This game feels like they intended for a co-op mode, but that it never reached its final stages. The open maps are huge, and players are given the option of taking vehicles to traverse these large spaces quickly. Most vehicles have multiple seats, and at least one of them is a gunner seat. However, the mounted guns on vehicles are slow to prepare when first getting into the seat, and so switching from driver to gunner often results in the player dying while trying to cock the machine gun. Playing with 2 or 3 friends, driving around these large maps and taking full advantage of the multi-seat vehicles would have elevated this game to even greater heights.
All in all, it was great to go back and play through Crysis. It holds up in all the areas that matter, and even the bugs or limitations of the game can be found in games that are still coming out today. If you’ve never played this game, I highly recommend checking it out, and if you’re coming back after thirteen years like I was, be prepared to be pleasantly surprised.
- The Clever Coyote