Crysis Review: Extraordinary but Flawed Masterpiece

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.