Crysis: Hands-On (Part Two)
The latest reason why I’ll need to upgrade my PC
Tags: Crysis Categories: PC Previews, Previews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Jul 20th, 2007
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Damn, this game is beautiful. It’s hard to take in the lush, organic jungle environments and not be impressed. The beautiful water, the wonderful lighting, the fantastic character models… and every last inch crafted with such amazing detail. Towards the end of the demo, I found myself transfixed looking at the rocks on the ground. Rocks! It was like, “here I am, walking off the dirt road and onto this mountain path and… Ooh! Those rocks look sooooo… rocky!” That’s not to say it’s all perfect. Even running on a top-of-the-line PC, the framerates still frequently shuddered, although it was hard to tell sometimes as this often blended with the game’s “blur” effect when turning.
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Naturally, much of this is undoubtedly due to the incredible structure of the environment, where nothing is static and everything is destructible. Previously we’ve marveled at the simple fact that the game’s palm trees could be lopped in half by gunfire. Here, I finally got to slap my hands on a mouse and keyboard and try it for myself. I found myself disappointed that I couldn’t fell a bigger tree, until the Crytek representative watching me informed me “No, no, no… you need a bigger gun to do that.”
However, while the tree-shooting may be amusing, this level of environment interaction extends elsewhere, as well. Oil barrels, when shot, spilled out their contents from the places you made holes. And the game’s shoddy shacks often fell apart into their component sheets of corrugated metal when hit with an explosive, or given a strong punch.
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Ah, but that’s getting into the other part of what makes Crysis special. While the game is all kinds of pretty, the secret to its success on the gameplay side is the suit the game’s protagonist wears, which not only gives the player all sorts of cool powers, but lets them switch-up the game to meet their gameplay style, as well. Players access the suit’s different modes by pressing in the mouse wheel, and then simply using an on-screen interface to pick the appropriate suit mode.
One of the settings boosts the player’s physical prowess, making the hand-to-hand skills more powerful, making punches hit harder, allowing you to throw things greater distances (including enemies you’ve grabbed onto), and increasing the jumping ability, making this setting ideal for close-quarters combat near buildings.
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Another setting juices up the player’s speed, making their normal walking speed a good deal faster, and turning the “run” key into “greased lightning”. There’s one for gizmos, gadgets and add-ons, which allows you to upgrade your various weapons with one of any number of add-on components, like silencers, laser scopes, sniper scopes and other wonderful toys – supposedly with most weapons getting multiple optional add-ons. There’s a stealth mode, and then, my personal favorite, defensive mode, where enemy attacks do less damage and health regenerates over time. There’s even one mode that grants the player complete invulnerability, although it sucks the suit’s power at such a fast rate that it can only be used for brief spurts.
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Switching back and forth between these various suit modes will play a huge part of the game and has a huge effect on the player’s strategy – would it be better to slap on invulnerability before jumping out from cover and getting into a massive gunfight, or would it be best to use the speed boost to close the distance and then switch to the power boost to take out the enemies in close range? Perhaps you’ll use stealth to sneak up on their flank first? At one point, I neglected to keep an eye on my health, and my tendency to charge headfirst into the thick of things (the suit really gets you high on your own powers) had nearly drained all my health – no problem! A quick duck behind cover and a swap to the defensive mode, and my problems healed themselves away! As it happens, there are no traditional “health packs” in the game, so this makes the use of the suit’s defensive mode absolutely vital.
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The game’s design is remarkably open-ended. You can essentially go anywhere on the map, with current objectives marked to make it easy for you to know where to go, and with some objectives optional but helpful, such as one to take out a jamming tower that’s keeping you from using radar equipment. However, if you just want to go around and blow things up, there’s nothing stopping you.
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The demo shown at E3 took place in an early part of the game, where the player mainly fights Korean enemy forces (and not the freeze-happy aliens that appear later in the game), but even these guys were a lot of fun to take down. The game’s enemies have pretty impressive and diverse AI, and often attempted to flank me, hide behind scenery, hop fences, and work in groups strategically. I fought sneaky enemies, cowardly enemies, enemies that took up fortified positions and held them, and enemies that tried to be all macho and rush me. One group of enemies I fought by jumping right past their defensive perimeter, and while one seemingly panicked and started frantically unloading his weapon at me, the other cowered behind a tree while taking pot shots. In another scenario, I played hide-and-seek with a guard behind some rocks, with us both losing the other’s position now and then (the radar marks whether an enemy knows your position, but it seems like they drop out in some situations). One guard apparently got completely lost in the underbrush before I cleared it away with a jeep’s chain gun (sadly, my attempt to help the poor guy resulted in his body being riddled with bullets).
All told, we had a blast with the game, and we can’t wait to get our hands on the final version when it’s released this September. That is… if we can pick up a new computer to make sure that it runs smoothly.
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Tags: Crysis
Posted by Jake McNeill on Jul 20th, 2007 and is filed under PC Previews, Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
