Last week I had the joy of playing and beating Crysis (you’ll find out later why I emphasize that I beat it). While playing I took some notes, which I want to share with you (some might be funny facts, others might show why Crysis sucks and others could be proof for some awesomeness that you can—still?—find in the game).

First off though, this is going to contain lots and lots of spoilers, so just lemme put up a

_**SPOILER ALERT**_

sign here before continuing.

Let me also start with a few clarifications: although it might totally sound as if Crysis is a shitty game when you read my notes, it still is an awesome game with the best graphics, best physics and best destructible game environment you can find anywhere at the moment.

And it looks gorgeous..

Absolutely gorgeous.

Let’s start now:

  • Crysis Screenshot I’m always kind of an explorer in games. After killing everyone in the first map in the part when you have to disable the jammer, I went around and looked at everything. I also began a violent rampage and destroyed everything I could, too. It’s fun. To be honest when I played the game for the first time at my cousin’s, I spent half an hour destroying huts, cars, boats and trees—lots of them—and I had the most fun in a long time, too. Having destroyed everything I noticed that there was a fridge in the hut, so I opened it and died. You heard me: the bloody fridge killed me when I opened it! Never try to open a fridge in the game when something is behind you and blocking you because the door of the fridge will squish you like a fly. Of course, I hadn’t saved, so I enjoyed playing the same part a second time >_<

  • I also realized that corpses disappear really quickly and there is not ragdoll physics on them either. I had the German version installed (except for the English language paks), so I figured that the German version has been cut, but a quick search quickly showed that Crytek removed some features everywhere and actively banned people who released mods which re-enabled some of them. I’m always pissed when I have to play a cut version because of some weird sense for censorship in Germany (for whatever reason—Crysis is rated AO in Germany, so I honestly don’t get it), but the way threads were closed and deleted on all possible Crysis boards really made me angry. Crytek/EA sent emails to boards that contained threads they didn’t like and pressured the admins into deleting stuff—someone must have learnt a thing or two from his history lessons, right Crytek? Sometimes soldiers lose their caps and when you shoot these, you actually get to see the original blood decals and splatter and it’s pretty crazy how high-detail they are and how much better they look compared to the “blood patches” available.

  • Playing 10+x intro videos is also incredibly annoying, I removed most of them after starting Crysis for the third time because they were simply annoying.

  • One thing that is very nice are the suit shortcuts (double-tapping some keys to activate a suit mode, e.g. jump for strength, crouch for stealth, sprint for speed and walk backwards for armor). For the first one or two hours I played without them and when I discovered them in the options menu, the game suddenly became a lot more fun. I still can vividly remember a scene in the first level, where I used the suit shortcuts to do some pretty crazy stunts and runs: Jumping onto a roof, sprinting and jumping towards a jeep and shooting everyone inside during the final jump. Later I kept sprinting towards soldiers like some kind of Predator and used one of them as shield before throwing him onto his colleagues.

  • Crysis’ AI is pretty horribly though. At least the low-level AI stuff: Soldiers didn’t see me countless times, although I was standing right in front of them or shooting at them and they simply didn’t notice me. Later in the game I found out that the silencers had some weird/exaggerated effect and that turning the silencer weapon modification off actually fixed some of the issues but in general I had lots of problems with it. If you were standing on a roof and actively shoot someone, the bots wouldn’t notice it—even when playing on Hard or Delta difficulty.

  • I also once chased a patrol boat in sprint mode and I was pretty disappointed by the fact that you can’t board a boat :-( You can jump onto it by using speed mode, sprinting under water and jumping out of the water like a flying fish—if you time it well, you can actually land on a patrol boat but the AI totally freaks out when that happens: The driver stops the boat, but doesn’t do anything else, while the cannoneer jerks around continuously which looks really awkward and buggy.

  • In general you can have quite a lot of fun by trying weird strategies. For example, there is a command post on a cliff that you have to take out and I drove to it with a boat and jumped up the rocks on the cliff side—only to get stuck between two rocks which eventually forced me to reload the last quicksave, because I couldn’t get the player unstuck. The game often punishes you for unconventional actions because the suit makes it really easy to get outside the level designer’s thinking which is often equal to a total breakdown of gameplay and fun. I’m used to become creative when I have additional powers like those provided by the nano suit and I felt encouraged to use different approaches to what I’d normally do in a first-person shooter. I think that’s just the conditioning from other games where you often have to use special abilities in the levels to solve puzzles (e.g. Prince of Persia or Prey). It’s a pity Crysis didn’t really require that.

  • Did I mention that the physics system is awesome? It is. If there is one single element that makes Crysis exceptional than it is its graphics. But only its physics system makes the game a pleasure to watch. The way you can destroy things really adds a lot and the way the environment reacts to your destruction—like sandbags being hurled around by a grenade explosion—make the game more satisfying. I once read that one of the intentions of Crytek was to make the game play and look like a good action movie and I often felt this way when playing. Trying my best to make the action look worthwhile—but often enough the game punished me for that idea.

  • I actually replayed the second level of the game, because at first I used a boat to avoid most of the level and get to the village where a hostage was kept and it wasn’t fun at all because I entered the level from the wrong side (unintended by the game designers) and it was very boring.

  • I still don’t get why anyone can say that Crysis’s AI is awesome.. its squad behavior is horrible and soldiers generally die like flies. There was one particular moment when I was inside a house and soldiers kept in pouring one by one from the same entrance (mind you there were windows and they had grenades, too, but didn’t use them) and I killed them one by one. This was when I decided to restart the level.

You need to force Crysis to be fun, if you want to have fun.

  • Because of all the AI issues I decided to try the Advanced AI mod for Crysis and I have to admit that the opponents became a lot tougher but still had issues (again I suspect some silencer weirdness happening). Later in the game I removed the mod again, because I experienced some weird bugs with the viewmodels and decided that I should play the game vanilla, so I know who is responsible for bugs.

  • In some levels it is also ridiculously easy to get out of the level area and be notified that you will be terminated in 3…2…1…woops if you don’t get back—if you toy around with strength mode, it’s pretty easy to jump into areas you shouldn’t be in. I think the levels weren’t tested sufficiently with the different suit modes and/or the guidlines for the level designers weren’t good enough.

  • In the level in which you have to destroy the AAA batteries Crysis became pretty boring for me. Everything was nice but it was repetitive, too, and it wasn’t challenging at all although it was still difficult (on Hard/Delta).

  • The tank level after it is pretty awesome. I got lost a few times though and didn’t know what to do because being told to “move forward to alpha front line” or something like that doesn’t really help when you have no idea what people are talking about and the map doesn’t show anything either (I kind of expected an ETQW-esque map to show up and tell me what to do). The first time I played the level I drove around and felt totally lost because I didn’t know what to do and whom to shoot. Then I decided that I wouldn’t let either of the accompanying tanks ‘die’ and restarted the level and stuck to that and although I had to reload more often, it was ok and fun because I had more of a mission than just reaching some train station—instead I took the enemy tanks and positions out one by one till I ran out of shells. GameStar complained about the lack of guidance in the game and I have to surprise myself by agreeing with them on this finding :-/

  • I noticed some weird viewmodel bugs during the game. Sometimes when looking through the scope and switching back, the view position wouldn’t be reset and suddenly you wouldn’t see your weapon anymore. Another weird bug was with the actual player viewmodel: The player’s arm were suddenly visible behind me holding nothing. Saving and reloading would fix those bugs most of the time.

  • Another weird thing was my fight against General Kyong: I didn’t know what to do at first and I didn’t really think of it, when I switched to strength mode and punched General Kyong to death. You heard right: I punched him to death—without losing any health or being hit once. How stupid is that for a boss fight? The poor coward tried to run away from me but he wasn’t faster than me, of course, because he was using strength mode, too. He also somehow didn’t manage to shoot because his mini-gun has quite some start-up time. That was the most sobering moment in the game for me because what I did felt totally wrong and I should have lost for that. Instead it worked exceptionally well and I punched him some 10 to 20 times before he dropped dead..

  • The alienship was a meh level, too: it was nice in the beginning and the zero gravity stuff was okay, too, but it was too long to be interesting. At the end, I had to wait like 10 minutes in the last chamber, before something actually happened.

  • The “Paradise Lost” level looks very nice and I enjoyed the snow and ice, too. I still doubt that anything can actually burn at -200 degrees (F or °C, doesn’t really matter either), but whatever.

  • During the cut-scene in which Prophet reappears the game actually crashed a few times for me (that is it crashed each time I replayed it). I waited some 10 minutes hoping that it was some overheating issue with the graphics card and indeed it worked after that, but good lord, I really was scared that playing Crysis was over for me at that moment.

  • The carrier levels are okay, although the seemingly endless waves of aliens were tedious after some time. I never get why games that try to appear ‘serious’ and ‘realistic’ still employ boss fights and the like as a means of game design. It totally doesn’t make sense and only Arcade games should use it. When I played Half-Life 2, the boss helicopter totally put me off, and the same applies to all boss fights in Crysis. It simply doesn’t feel right…

  • Especially if you can’t finish the game for some damn bug!!! One thing that really made me angry and with angry I mean annoyed and with annoyed I mean totally pissed off was a bug in the last bit of the last level where you have to shoot a hatch with the TAC gun: The damn thing wouldn’t lock on! I replayed the last part of the level for 3 or 4 times on Hard until I was totally upset with the game. Add to that some annoying bug where you can fall through the deck and I gave up. I googled a bit and I found out that quite a few people had actually experienced that bug and it has turned them off as much as me. I switched to god mode, infinite ammo, etc. and replayed the last half of the level to see if I could maybe actually finish the game and indeed it worked when I played it for the fifth time.

  • The ending totally sucks. Cliff hangers are okay sometimes, but I really felt like it was a really bad ending—especially after that incredibly stupid boss fight.

  • Last but not least a last bug: If you catch a hunter, it needs quite a few punches to die. If you simply throw it away from you after catching it, it immediately deactivates. Logic?

All in all, the bugs in Crysis and the constant AI issues drove me nuts and I totally felt like I beat the game when it was over and I don’t want to touch it anytime soon again. I feel sorry for EA’s QA people. They must have been in for a painful one if the released game still had so many bugs :( However Crysis is still a good game (if you have a fast PC) and has some nice cut-scenes and action sequences and the graphics and physics in the game are simple the best you can find at the moment (except for Crysis Warhead I guess).

With this I conclude my ‘random notes’ review and hope that Crysis: Warhead has fewer bugs and is more fun to play because Crysis really deserved to be more fun.

Cheers,
 Andreas