When I saw the trailers for the new Crysis 2 coming out this year I was really excited, the trailer really seemed like an interesting story. I had yet to play the original Crysis and wanted to get through it before Crysis 2 came out, so I went out and picked up a copy. I went into Crysis not expecting too much from the gameplay and story, but what I found was severely lacking even from my low expectations. I'm going to explain the basics of the story in this review, don't worry its not ruining much.
The so called story was barely told with little explanation for the current missions you undertook, not to mention their repetitiveness. Half the missions in this game involve taking out an entire battalion of soldiers in order to destroy an AA gun for air support, only to have the air support either not come at all or be totally useless since you killed everyone to get to the AA.
The story of Crysis seems like it was written by two separate people for two separate games then smashed together at the last second to make Crysis longer. The first half of the game involves rescuing hostages from the North Koreans and stopping the power crazed general from activating the mysterious device. This half of the game involved a strong element of stealth and erratically increasing climatic battles. Most of the time you find yourself severely out numbered and out gunned, with ammo being a constant issue. Eventually, having to fight soldiers with clones of your armor, which are supposedly lower grade then your's but seem to take twice the number of shots to kill. Leading up to a somewhat climactic battle with the Korean General, which was nothing compared to the actual fight to get to him.
The second half of the game is a totally different experience all together. After the general is defeated you are forced to explore the alien structure. This leads to one of THE MOST POINTLESS LEVELS IN A FPS EVER. The level consists of swimming around a zero-g spaceship for the length of about a half an hour, with few enemies to shoot and no ammo to shoot them with.
After escaping the ship you are chased by alien drones that are like sitting ducks compared to the Koreans. The whole game just takes a steep decline after that point, both in story and difficulty. Resulting in running around the island, then running around, and then running around an airship carrier, before finally fighting the final boss and defeating it in less than 20 shots of a rifle. Only to leave off at a rather anticlimactic point, which clearly felt like a rushed ending, compared to the first half of the game. This makes me wonder why they spent all that useless time on the spaceship level when they could have been making a decent final level and boss battle, or at least coming up with a better ending. But on a positive note, Crysis 2 doesn't even seem to be dealing with that cliff hanger so hopefully we wont have to put up with the crap storyline from this game.
The gameplay of Crysis was also lacking from a FPS perspective. Fights were often over within a matter of seconds because the soldiers had no idea where I was and I could easily eliminate them, or the fights would last incredibly long because they knew my exact position and I had no ammo. They all eventually turned into the later during the first half of the game, making it very frustrating and unexciting. Some of the worst moments were the forced vehicle missions\where it was necessary to drive a tank, hummer, or aircraft. All of which usually died in three rocket shots. The tanks mission was by far the most frustrating as it pitted you against 5 other tanks and 20 rpg carrying Koreans at once, making me abandon my tank and run like crazy, hoping I didn't get blown to pieces before reaching the next check point.
Even with all of the terrible situations that the game placed you in, the nano-armor remained mostly unhelpful.
Most of the armor abilities were useless as activating any armor ability other than increased armor in combat would result in a swift death. The increased strength I found was suicide, as by the time I got near enough to an enemy that I could melee them, I was already being shot at by his 5 other friends. Even the "speed boost" armor ability did little, giving you a limited run of 2 seconds before having to recharge you shields and leaving you completely vulnerable the entire time. The camouflage was the only tactically useful power as the first half of the game ended up being more of a stealth shooter than anything else, and even that was poorly done as you could only take a couple steps before it was deactivated and you had to recharge.
As for the graphics, I couldn't really tell if anything was amazing as I had to have everything on the lowest settings just to keep the game running. I feel that they alienated a large audience with this games high hardware requirements, and could have easily released a version for the PS3 with the near quality that this generated. Most of the graphics problems with this game was that they felt they needed to draw every single bush and tree within a mile radius of your player, slowing the game down immensely.
If you are playing this game just to see amazing graphics you should just go watch Avatar or some tech demo's on youtube instead of wasting you time on this. This game should never have been released as anything more than a lengthy tech demo. What good is an amazing graphics engine without the story and gameplay to go along with it?