Review: Crysis
I wrote this at another site and decided to post it here too. Lemme know what you guys think of it.
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I picked up that game today and must say it kicks ass.
Let's start with what you see first: The Installer
It was just like any other but not quite as tricked out. It was nice, simple, and easy to use.
Now for the menu:
It's nice and plain yet quite futuristic looking. In the system settings menu (I believe it is that one) you can change the color scheme for your in-game HUD and the menu. The color choices are green, amber, icy blue, and white. I personally prefer the green (duh, lol). The various menus are quite coordinated and easy to figure out with little effort.
Graphics:
Flat out beautiful, but this is a difficult game to run if you have low end hardware. I had to overclock my Pentium D to 3.2GHz just to run it on medium with my 8500GT. It even looks good at medium, although I don't recommend low as everything looks very blurry and bland. My one complaint would be that you have to be using Vista to get the settings on very high even though you can go into the .config files and do a little swapping if you know what your doing so you can see the maximum settings.
Gameplay:
It's pretty easy to figure out how to play the game. If you have previous experience playing FPS games you will know the basic controls and it doesn't take much to figure out how to modify your weapon or change armor modes.
For the gun you can add various scopes or a flashlight to any of them and with a few you can add a silencer and tranquilizer dart launcher (which I haven't used much yet... it's somewhat difficult). For the handgun you can attach a silencer and a laser pointer/flashlight.
The armor has four modes: Armor, Speed, Strength, and Stealth. Armor mode absorbs more damage and regenerates your health faster. Speed mode makes you move and reload faster along with short bursts of really fast speed (we're talking about 40mph from my estimate). Strength mode lets you throw things farther, punch harder, and jump a lot higher. Stealth mode makes you almost invisible for a little while. It runs out more quickly the faster you move.
The AI is pretty intelligent and made to be life like. They yell obscenities at you while trying to kill you along with other things, such as taking a piss (I actually saw a guy do this... quite funny in my opinion) or talking to each other. It's nice being able to run around and not have people that always know where you are shooting at you.
The weapons are pretty good. I've encountered a few so far, such as the pistol (if you find another you get to dual wield), the SCAR, the FYI (10 less rounds per clip and less accurate than the SCAR), the sniper (really loud, slow rate of fire, one hit kill), the shotgun (awesome at close quarters), and the rocket launcher (holds three rockets and is unable to be reloaded). They're all quite balanced and straightforward to use.
I have only encountered the Koreans so far and no Aliens (even though you see them quite a bit) and don't have anything to write about the Aliens. I'll write about them later on.
The interactiveness of the environment makes the game really fun. If you shoot at the smaller to medium sized trees they break and fall over. Most of the buildings are destructible and you can pick up almost everything and throw it. Vehicles have certain weakspots (such as the gas can on the back of the hummer) and the tires blow out when shot. You can also go faster with vehicles by holding down the same button set for running on foot (the Shift key in most cases).
System Requirements:
It's a very demanding game. I have the following specs and can run it a little over medium with a little overclocking on the video card:
Pentium D running at 3.2GHz
1GB DDR2 800 RAM
250GB SATA II HDD
MSI 8500GT 256MB (512MB Shared) OC'd (550MHz core and 575MHz RAM from 459MHz and 400MHz respectively)
I have everything on medium except for the physics and sound (both are on high) at 1024x768 for the resolution. I'm estimating that I get about 20-30fps most of the time.
I personally recommend to try out the demo to this game to see if you like it if you still aren't too sure after reading this review. The demo is just about as good as the full version of the game only not as refined (still pretty dang good though) and you can only get about an hour or so worth the play time out of it.
I have yet to try out the multiplayer. I'll write about that later on after I beat the single player.
From what I see so far, I rate this game a 9.9/10 because it is a great game, but they could've allowed you to set the game to very high without buying Vista or editing vital game files.
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