Moody Gamer

Crytek, the developers of the very much hyped yet great game: Crysis will soon be releasing the Standalone expansion of the game named Crysis Warhead. The game story is the same as the first one except this time you get to play as Psycho instead of Nomad. The single player levels will be more action packed than before with a lot of improvements almost everywhere. The multiplayer has been also tweaked and also the big question answered: Will it run better? YES IT WILL. The first two reviews that went online already are giving great scores for the game. IGN gave it 9.4 while Eurogamer (which was harsh on MGS4) gave it 9/10. The reviews already say that it can run at high resolutions on Enthusiast (Very High) setting pretty well on a 8800 GTS card. Ofcourse no mention of Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering being used. Still, the talk about performance optimizations are pretty evident in the reviews which is always good.

After Crysis was released, Crytek wasn’t happy on how the sales went and blamed it on piracy. So they already announced that they will stop releasing PC exclusives and might consider console releases. Though with the near release of Crysis Warhead (25th September 2008), in a surprise move, Crytek announced that both Crysis and Crysis Warhead are available on Steam! For those who don’t know, Steam is an application you can install on your PC and through it buy and download games. You can quickly learn more about Steam at store.steampowered.com/about. This marks the first EA game being released on Steam and questions are already floating on whether more games will follow (Red Alert 3!).

The reason for Crytek releasing both games on Steam is because it proved to be a very effective way to sell games with lesser risk of piracy and hence better sales which might help Crytek reconsider their PC exclusives direction, though I doubt.

Lastly, I went ahead and pre-ordered Crysis Warhead of Steam (it is released there on 16th of September) which is the first time I use it, lets see how it goes oh and keep an eye for MEGamers review.

Ok, I played Crysis after the long wait and all I can say is that it is a great game, period. The graphics are the best you can ever find on any platform, there is no competition in that area for a while. The particles, lighting, textures, animation and the best motion blur effect in a game to date. Ok, after the awe part with the graphics, you will start to feel this is just Far Cry with a nano suit and a different setting, at least for the first half of the game. In that first half, you got your freedom of choice. Go sneaky or go Rambo. Of course it is far better than Far Cry when compared gameplay wise but the impression of “I have been here” is still there if you ever played Far Cry. The second half is a linear game. So straight forward that you have been there before. Again, Crysis still does it very well. Add to both parts: vehicular levels, nice weapon customizations even though they are almost the same across all the weapons and the suit.

As for the AI, am not sure. At times, they are realistic and intelligent. They know how to flank, take cover, and flush you out with grenades. At other times, they don’t do anything and take a long time staring at you while they are getting all the bullets. It is kinda same problem that was in Far Cry except it happens less frequent. Still you will have the occasional weird feeling that there is something wrong with the AI at some points. Now of course am talking about the humans, as for the aliens, they are just the same in any game. As soon as they see you, they will charge at you. They are intelligent enough though to try to dodge your aimed shots. As for the longevity of the game, it is shorter than Far Cry and slightly longer than Call of Duty 4. Though considering the time it took to make this game, you expect the game to last longer.

It was stated that Crysis will be a trilogy (milking the cow anyone!), maybe that might answer why it wasn’t that long.

I would like to go back to the graphics (biggest selling point for this game no doubt). First when we saw the first screenshots of the game, they were so realistic. Though after checking out the game at very high settings, I find it hard to compare it to the first screenshots yet. Even with high settings, the game really sits on the low frame rate figures even when run on a well equipped PC. Now when I compare Crysis (Crytek Engine) to Doom 3 or Unreal 3 engines, it is obvious that it provides superior graphics but at the cost of performance. While both Doom3 and Unreal 3 engines show good graphics with great performance even on high settings. The message is, for a normal gamer, will he be able to differentiate between Gears of War (Unreal 3 engine) and Crysis? He can tell that Crysis is better but will end up wondering why his PC can run GoW at 60 FPS at full settings while Crysis is at 20 FPS (even dipping to single figure digits at some points) at high settings only. Someone might argue that the engines have different applications. As in, unreal is for small areas while Crysis is for outdoor settings. Which might be the reason but then, Far Cry did outdoors and it is a few years old now.

The short story is, Crytek went a bit too far on the engine that it impacted the performance. Both id and Epic know that drawback when trying to go for bleeding cutting edge graphics and hence they maintain balance with their engines. I would prefer they released it later and worked on getting more content into the game while the hardware market matures enough so more people will be able to enjoy this game better.

So there you have it, Crysis is a great game but it didn’t live to the hype that was surrounding it.