Javaxcx
02-12-2007, 11:40 AM
The graphical masterpiece Crysis made its groundbreaking debut only weeks ago, mesmerizing players with the most photorealistic fully interactive experience to date.
Set in 2020, Crysis takes us to a proverbial tropical paradise in the Philippine Sea under the pretext of a covert military operation to secure hostages captured by the North Koreans. As with most first person shooter stories in all of antiquity, the situation quickly becomes FUBAR and you are the 'Army-of-one' who must save the day-- and the mission. Sporting the latest in military technology, you and your team are equipped with the much talked about Nanosuit while exploring the island. The Nanosuit has, outside the graphical achievements, been Crytek's secondary selling point to the diversity of the gameplay in Crysis. As with Farcry, the open sandbox world naturally allows for a multitude of gameplay variance as you complete your objectives. The addition of the Nanosuit however vastly increases the potential ways to go about completing your many objectives. You're given four choices by which to customize your immediate bodily conditions with the suit: Armour, Strength, Speed, or the deliriously fun Cloak.
Armour
As it sounds, your suit acts as your shield by solidifying and tightening around you like a suit of armour. Essentially this gives you 100 extra hit points in the form of your suit's energy reserves. In addition to this, it acts as a shock absorber when you fall from great heights, and also allows you to recover energy much faster then in the other modes.
Strength
My personal favourite, the strength mode for your suit is the absolute shit. You jump ridiculous heights, throw objects ridiculous lengths, virtually eliminate all the recoil in your firearm, and can punch the life out of anything you hit. The Strength mode turns your suit into a red set of overalls that scream "I AM BLOOD DRUNK" and basically turn you into an unstoppable Conan the Barbarian until your suit's energy wears out. Unfortunately, being a hardass is an energy extensive endeavour and simple tasks like jumping 30 feet can take upwards of 30% of your reserve in a single bound.
Speed
While not the same as a line of cocaine on a nice breezy summer's day, the speed mode is probably your least used feature; but it does have its charms. When engaged, you walk faster at no cost to your energy reserves, but the moment you sprint, your energy drains faster then any other suit feature. However, in the less-then-one-second sprint you will likely cover 50 meters of ground.
Cloak
The cloak is exactly as it sounds. You become the Predator and slink around unseen to all foes-- while it lasts. Unfortunately, the cloak is an unstable creation and shooting, and in most interactive situations, the cloak disengages and your energy is dropped to 0. The cloak is one of the more often used features in the game and has some pretty interesting effects on enemy AI. I'll explain them a bit later on.
In addition to the Nanosuit, each weapon (with special few exceptions) comes with a vast array of customizable attachments if you can find them. The level of customization can range from the absurd to the devastatingly awesome. For example, if you want a laser sight, coupled with a sniper scope on a shotgun, not only is it possible but it is also encouraged. But if you want a reflex sight and a flashlight on a sniper rifle you are encouraged to do that too. Compared to other games, the arsenal of weaponry in Crysis is pretty much on par with games like Call of Duty 4; plenty of guns, but more would be welcome.
The enemy AI was also built from the ground up. Personally, the only games in recent memory that sported AI that were any good was F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 4. However, Crytek's take is very refreshing. Since Guerilla tactics is the primary foundation for the jungle combat, enemy units act very realistically to the situations they are set in. The best way to describe it is to imagine yourself in a squad in the forest hunting for a guy in a suit that can make him invisible (although for all they know there are 20 of around them who can't turn invisible). Enemies will navigate around trees, look around in crevices, use signaling to squad members to press the search forward, and sometimes just stop and listen for you. Since there are different types of enemies lurking the woods: scouts, snipers, etc, each acts in his own specific way. Snipers typically do not move around much, and if they do it is to get a better vantage point in deep brush. In combat, the AI tends to work very well as a team with what seems to be a unified objective in each conflict to flank you if there are enough of them. While it sounds fairly cliché, the AI tend to do this very well if you aren't paying attention. Another interesting element is the cloak. If you engage enemies and cloak, they will not be able to home in on you directly and quite often will blind fire into the forest looking to hit you, then they will act like a squad to flush you out. Of course, if you circumvent them you hold all the cards. While it sounds this will eliminate the challenge out of most firefights, it certainly does not because the environments are vast and enemies tend to lurk in seemingly empty thickets in the woods. The capacities of the AI are quite extensive and is certainly not limited to this review.
Another aspect of the technology in Crysis is the environmental interaction. As seen in early videos, you could destroy palm trees at any point on them, blow up houses, and destroy very species specific parts of vehicles or objects and so on. Much of this was retained in the final version save some very few and specific aspects of terrain and structure. It does take away from the realism to be able to blast a whole house to smithereens but not break one particular fence, but in all likelihood it is excusable because there will be a house nearby to explode or a tree that has been standing too long.
Most of the aforementioned you likely already knew if you have been following the game's development since 2006. So this next part of the review is going to deal with more or less the graphics and performance.
Without a doubt, Crysis' graphics have been the centrepiece of its promotional material. The early E3 previews featured a polished oil-painted photorealistic experience. The finished product is however, not the same. The Crytek dev team has said that the graphical capacities of Crysis are so far advanced that video cards and computers to date are not yet capable of taking advantage of the full graphical potential of the game in smooth frame rates. They are not joking. The rig I am using to run Crysis consists of:
Core 2 E6600, overclocked to 3.0ghz
ASUS 8800GTX
2GB of OCZ med-range RAM
DX9 on Windows XP
These are your primary concerns for running Crysis. These are only marginally above the recommended hardware on the box art. I run the game in on High on DX9, but with various tweaks I have found (and will provide if asked) that allow the game to use many of the DX10 features. Typically, I pull a totally smooth gameplay (anywhere from 30-60 fps) experience and it is only when the firefight is extravagant that I see slowdown (20-30 fps). I should note that I also have disabled all AA settings. A 2x AA is enough to consistently bring a 8800GTX in Crysis down to choppy performance and is really not even necessary. The following pictures were taken quite literally in a 7-10fps slideshow. They are set to 16x AA, at 1280x1024 resolution on the highest settings I can muster out of the software (not necessarily the hardware).
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Jungle1.jpg
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Night1.jpg
Unfortunately these images do not get across the sheer beauty of the soft lighting, motion blur, reflections, or even the textures while walking around the island.
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Korean1.jpg
Facial textures in Crysis are virtually flawless. Skin pigmentation, shadow, muscle movement, eyes, they are all extremely well detailed and rigorously perfected so when you grab a Korean in cloak and turn on strength and choke the life out of him, you really get the feeling he is terrified before (as the picture suggests), you throw him down a cliff. The mountain in the distance is blurred in the image and in game, but if you were zoom in on it with a sniper scope, you would find it is not a boundary texture but a very real part of the world with trees, leaves, grass, and rocks that you can interact with. Crytek made it very possible for you to look at the top of a mountain you can by no means normally access look like a normal piece of the terrain right down to shadows and local fauna running around.
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Creek1.jpg
Unfortunately, the graphical diversity of the jungle terrain I cannot even hope to put to words. You really do have to go out and explore the world and see the level of sophistication put into each meter of the island.
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Ice1.jpg
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Core1.jpg
The graphical enterprise is not limited to perfecting a jungle environment but also an alien environment in the level "Core" and the subsequent frosty world outside. The level "Core", as videos have shown, is inside an alien structure in zero gravity. It harkens somewhat to Prey insomuch that the controls feel very similar to that of walking around on the gravity strips and flipping around. Reviews have called it disorientating, but the feeling passes very quickly as you become familiar with it. The visuals for the alien environment are given the same level of dedication and detail as the jungle and give a creepy yet astounding feeling that this might be what a real alien core might look like.
The best part of the visuals for those of us with no budget for 8800GTXs or high powered CPUs, is that even older cards in the 7 and early 8 series (sorry ATI fanboys, I don't know your pseudo-code for video cards because I don't like to use crap, only flush it) will run appreciably well on low and medium settings. Not only that, it STILL look more stunning then even games like Bioshock. You do not lose nearly as much detail as you might think by downgrading the settings and are still in for a treat.
Crysis' multiplayer is unfortunately nothing special. It did have the potential for some incredible shenanigans and very well might in the future, but as it stands now the Power Struggle and Deathmatch are not enough to make me pull away from the C&C Mode in Renegade or the Titan Mode in BF2142. To minimize the hit to DX9 users, there are servers, without object physics, dedicated to DX9 users, and servers with object physics exclusive to DX10 users. The Power Struggle mode is similar to the point-taking strategy of Battlefield, but with some added features depending on what objects are captured. If, for example, the war factory is captured, tanks may be purchased. If the Research Facility is captured, then alien firearms and nuclear warheads can be purchased. It is all very fun, but there are better kinds of gameplay in Battlefield.
Crysis does have its faults though. The foremost being the problems the Crytek team had with German Law. There are no ragdoll interactions with corpses, or gratuitous gore or violence because apparently it is illegal to do that in German games and maintain its rating. This is a real hit to the realism in Crysis because personally I was hoping to be able to rip the arms off a Korean soldier and beat him to death with them before tossing him up in the air and using a palm tree like a baseball bat and sending him out to sea. It's a flight of fancy, but it's mine and I am allowed to have it. The Crytek team have also asked all prominent communities not to give support OR offer links to mods that enable this kind of contact out of what I can only guess is paranoia after that GTA Coffee thing fiasco. So far, they are complying with much outrage. The other problem with Crysis is that there is a distinct lack of realism in the accuracy of the firearms. I unloaded a full clip into a man's face from a vantage point with an automatic firearm, and all he did was a little dance to indicate he was taking damage. I had to resolve to walking up to him and ripping his face off in white hot rage (it is metaphorical because German law is against this too). Sniper rifles don't have this problem per se, but it is frustrating all the same because a bullet is a bullet at < 50 yards. Thinking right now, I can't think of anything else that is particularly annoying or disappointing with Crysis because I enjoyed it extremely and would heartedly recommend it to everyone to at least give a shot to see what we can do with graphical technology today.
Set in 2020, Crysis takes us to a proverbial tropical paradise in the Philippine Sea under the pretext of a covert military operation to secure hostages captured by the North Koreans. As with most first person shooter stories in all of antiquity, the situation quickly becomes FUBAR and you are the 'Army-of-one' who must save the day-- and the mission. Sporting the latest in military technology, you and your team are equipped with the much talked about Nanosuit while exploring the island. The Nanosuit has, outside the graphical achievements, been Crytek's secondary selling point to the diversity of the gameplay in Crysis. As with Farcry, the open sandbox world naturally allows for a multitude of gameplay variance as you complete your objectives. The addition of the Nanosuit however vastly increases the potential ways to go about completing your many objectives. You're given four choices by which to customize your immediate bodily conditions with the suit: Armour, Strength, Speed, or the deliriously fun Cloak.
Armour
As it sounds, your suit acts as your shield by solidifying and tightening around you like a suit of armour. Essentially this gives you 100 extra hit points in the form of your suit's energy reserves. In addition to this, it acts as a shock absorber when you fall from great heights, and also allows you to recover energy much faster then in the other modes.
Strength
My personal favourite, the strength mode for your suit is the absolute shit. You jump ridiculous heights, throw objects ridiculous lengths, virtually eliminate all the recoil in your firearm, and can punch the life out of anything you hit. The Strength mode turns your suit into a red set of overalls that scream "I AM BLOOD DRUNK" and basically turn you into an unstoppable Conan the Barbarian until your suit's energy wears out. Unfortunately, being a hardass is an energy extensive endeavour and simple tasks like jumping 30 feet can take upwards of 30% of your reserve in a single bound.
Speed
While not the same as a line of cocaine on a nice breezy summer's day, the speed mode is probably your least used feature; but it does have its charms. When engaged, you walk faster at no cost to your energy reserves, but the moment you sprint, your energy drains faster then any other suit feature. However, in the less-then-one-second sprint you will likely cover 50 meters of ground.
Cloak
The cloak is exactly as it sounds. You become the Predator and slink around unseen to all foes-- while it lasts. Unfortunately, the cloak is an unstable creation and shooting, and in most interactive situations, the cloak disengages and your energy is dropped to 0. The cloak is one of the more often used features in the game and has some pretty interesting effects on enemy AI. I'll explain them a bit later on.
In addition to the Nanosuit, each weapon (with special few exceptions) comes with a vast array of customizable attachments if you can find them. The level of customization can range from the absurd to the devastatingly awesome. For example, if you want a laser sight, coupled with a sniper scope on a shotgun, not only is it possible but it is also encouraged. But if you want a reflex sight and a flashlight on a sniper rifle you are encouraged to do that too. Compared to other games, the arsenal of weaponry in Crysis is pretty much on par with games like Call of Duty 4; plenty of guns, but more would be welcome.
The enemy AI was also built from the ground up. Personally, the only games in recent memory that sported AI that were any good was F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 4. However, Crytek's take is very refreshing. Since Guerilla tactics is the primary foundation for the jungle combat, enemy units act very realistically to the situations they are set in. The best way to describe it is to imagine yourself in a squad in the forest hunting for a guy in a suit that can make him invisible (although for all they know there are 20 of around them who can't turn invisible). Enemies will navigate around trees, look around in crevices, use signaling to squad members to press the search forward, and sometimes just stop and listen for you. Since there are different types of enemies lurking the woods: scouts, snipers, etc, each acts in his own specific way. Snipers typically do not move around much, and if they do it is to get a better vantage point in deep brush. In combat, the AI tends to work very well as a team with what seems to be a unified objective in each conflict to flank you if there are enough of them. While it sounds fairly cliché, the AI tend to do this very well if you aren't paying attention. Another interesting element is the cloak. If you engage enemies and cloak, they will not be able to home in on you directly and quite often will blind fire into the forest looking to hit you, then they will act like a squad to flush you out. Of course, if you circumvent them you hold all the cards. While it sounds this will eliminate the challenge out of most firefights, it certainly does not because the environments are vast and enemies tend to lurk in seemingly empty thickets in the woods. The capacities of the AI are quite extensive and is certainly not limited to this review.
Another aspect of the technology in Crysis is the environmental interaction. As seen in early videos, you could destroy palm trees at any point on them, blow up houses, and destroy very species specific parts of vehicles or objects and so on. Much of this was retained in the final version save some very few and specific aspects of terrain and structure. It does take away from the realism to be able to blast a whole house to smithereens but not break one particular fence, but in all likelihood it is excusable because there will be a house nearby to explode or a tree that has been standing too long.
Most of the aforementioned you likely already knew if you have been following the game's development since 2006. So this next part of the review is going to deal with more or less the graphics and performance.
Without a doubt, Crysis' graphics have been the centrepiece of its promotional material. The early E3 previews featured a polished oil-painted photorealistic experience. The finished product is however, not the same. The Crytek dev team has said that the graphical capacities of Crysis are so far advanced that video cards and computers to date are not yet capable of taking advantage of the full graphical potential of the game in smooth frame rates. They are not joking. The rig I am using to run Crysis consists of:
Core 2 E6600, overclocked to 3.0ghz
ASUS 8800GTX
2GB of OCZ med-range RAM
DX9 on Windows XP
These are your primary concerns for running Crysis. These are only marginally above the recommended hardware on the box art. I run the game in on High on DX9, but with various tweaks I have found (and will provide if asked) that allow the game to use many of the DX10 features. Typically, I pull a totally smooth gameplay (anywhere from 30-60 fps) experience and it is only when the firefight is extravagant that I see slowdown (20-30 fps). I should note that I also have disabled all AA settings. A 2x AA is enough to consistently bring a 8800GTX in Crysis down to choppy performance and is really not even necessary. The following pictures were taken quite literally in a 7-10fps slideshow. They are set to 16x AA, at 1280x1024 resolution on the highest settings I can muster out of the software (not necessarily the hardware).
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Jungle1.jpg
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Night1.jpg
Unfortunately these images do not get across the sheer beauty of the soft lighting, motion blur, reflections, or even the textures while walking around the island.
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Korean1.jpg
Facial textures in Crysis are virtually flawless. Skin pigmentation, shadow, muscle movement, eyes, they are all extremely well detailed and rigorously perfected so when you grab a Korean in cloak and turn on strength and choke the life out of him, you really get the feeling he is terrified before (as the picture suggests), you throw him down a cliff. The mountain in the distance is blurred in the image and in game, but if you were zoom in on it with a sniper scope, you would find it is not a boundary texture but a very real part of the world with trees, leaves, grass, and rocks that you can interact with. Crytek made it very possible for you to look at the top of a mountain you can by no means normally access look like a normal piece of the terrain right down to shadows and local fauna running around.
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Creek1.jpg
Unfortunately, the graphical diversity of the jungle terrain I cannot even hope to put to words. You really do have to go out and explore the world and see the level of sophistication put into each meter of the island.
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Ice1.jpg
http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/1/0/7/0/4/Core1.jpg
The graphical enterprise is not limited to perfecting a jungle environment but also an alien environment in the level "Core" and the subsequent frosty world outside. The level "Core", as videos have shown, is inside an alien structure in zero gravity. It harkens somewhat to Prey insomuch that the controls feel very similar to that of walking around on the gravity strips and flipping around. Reviews have called it disorientating, but the feeling passes very quickly as you become familiar with it. The visuals for the alien environment are given the same level of dedication and detail as the jungle and give a creepy yet astounding feeling that this might be what a real alien core might look like.
The best part of the visuals for those of us with no budget for 8800GTXs or high powered CPUs, is that even older cards in the 7 and early 8 series (sorry ATI fanboys, I don't know your pseudo-code for video cards because I don't like to use crap, only flush it) will run appreciably well on low and medium settings. Not only that, it STILL look more stunning then even games like Bioshock. You do not lose nearly as much detail as you might think by downgrading the settings and are still in for a treat.
Crysis' multiplayer is unfortunately nothing special. It did have the potential for some incredible shenanigans and very well might in the future, but as it stands now the Power Struggle and Deathmatch are not enough to make me pull away from the C&C Mode in Renegade or the Titan Mode in BF2142. To minimize the hit to DX9 users, there are servers, without object physics, dedicated to DX9 users, and servers with object physics exclusive to DX10 users. The Power Struggle mode is similar to the point-taking strategy of Battlefield, but with some added features depending on what objects are captured. If, for example, the war factory is captured, tanks may be purchased. If the Research Facility is captured, then alien firearms and nuclear warheads can be purchased. It is all very fun, but there are better kinds of gameplay in Battlefield.
Crysis does have its faults though. The foremost being the problems the Crytek team had with German Law. There are no ragdoll interactions with corpses, or gratuitous gore or violence because apparently it is illegal to do that in German games and maintain its rating. This is a real hit to the realism in Crysis because personally I was hoping to be able to rip the arms off a Korean soldier and beat him to death with them before tossing him up in the air and using a palm tree like a baseball bat and sending him out to sea. It's a flight of fancy, but it's mine and I am allowed to have it. The Crytek team have also asked all prominent communities not to give support OR offer links to mods that enable this kind of contact out of what I can only guess is paranoia after that GTA Coffee thing fiasco. So far, they are complying with much outrage. The other problem with Crysis is that there is a distinct lack of realism in the accuracy of the firearms. I unloaded a full clip into a man's face from a vantage point with an automatic firearm, and all he did was a little dance to indicate he was taking damage. I had to resolve to walking up to him and ripping his face off in white hot rage (it is metaphorical because German law is against this too). Sniper rifles don't have this problem per se, but it is frustrating all the same because a bullet is a bullet at < 50 yards. Thinking right now, I can't think of anything else that is particularly annoying or disappointing with Crysis because I enjoyed it extremely and would heartedly recommend it to everyone to at least give a shot to see what we can do with graphical technology today.