This review will contain no comments or discussion on the graphics of Crysis. Really, at this point in time, do I really need to even mention the visual fidelity of this game? It is incredible, let’s move on.

Instead, I’ll talk about what it is like to play this game, because many dismiss Crysis as ‘all style no substance’ and this simply isn’t the case. Crysis plays unlike any other first person shooter on the market and definitely deserves to be praised for improving upon the gameplay Crytek is renowned for.

Let us begin with the single player portion of the game. Crytek wastes little time with exposition or plot and gets you blowing-shit-up as soon as possible. You ‘halo’ jump into the action after the US military intercepts a distress call from an archaeological team doing research on a remote tropical island. The North Korean army is also interested and has mobilized their forces and occupied the area. You play ‘Nomad,’ a member of a covert Special Forces team equipped with the most advanced weaponry in the world, tasked with infiltrating the area and investigating goings-on. So-far-so-Steven Seagal. But the island is hiding a secret. Deep within the bowels of the island something is stirring, and the game definitely has some twists down the road.

The first portion of the game plays out a lot like Farcry, the previous work from Crytek. You fight through various environments which can all be described as some form of ‘jungle,’ fighting the North Korean army in various expansive locales. At your disposal you have an arsenal of high-powered weapons, from rifles and dual pistols to rocket launchers and land mines. The enemy also has access to guns, tanks, transport vehicles, boats, planes, helicopters and more goons than a Bond villain.

The combat is frenetic, but also incredibly open-ended. Most missions are along the lines of ‘explore this vast island and watch out for the sharks.’ As a covert operative in the future you have access to an advanced ‘nanosuit’ which provides the core defining feature of the game. You can change your suit’s setting on the fly during combat, using it to provide you with super strength, speed, extra bullet resistance or even invisibility. All of these powers drain the suit’s power, which also forms the health system in Crysis. Using these powers drains your suit energy quicker, leaving you vulnerable to attack; the game strikes a good balance here by making the risk/reward of doing this work. Depending on the difficulty you play the game at, you can be killed in one shot and eaten by sea turtles, or play an immortal god carving a swathe of destruction across the island.

This combination of guns, vehicles and suit powers makes for incredibly varied combat. Coupled with very large environments (one level in Crysis is comparable in size to the entire game world of Oblivion), quality enemy AI and a large variation on combat scenarios, the gameplay of Crysis is both challenging and exciting.

But things take an awkward turn after this initial part of the game. A significant plot change occurs, and environments are heavily dependent on the introduction of another side to this battle. It is at this point that the combat style of the game radically changes for the worse.

While the combat is certainly still good, the comparisons to a similar situation in Farcry seem so clear as to be a kind of bitter irony. The environment still provides exciting and varied gameplay but one particular brand of annoying enemy takes so many bullets to kill, and is so hard to shoot, and does so little damage to you that you will tear your eyeballs out just to stop the torment and frustration. Compared to the fantastic early parts of the game fighting the Korean forces, this drastic change in the game is a massive letdown. And things only get worse and worse until the end of the game, which is monumentally underwhelming.

But don’t let that stop you playing Crysis, which is still superb beyond belief. The variation on combat, while swapping between awesome and horrible, provides good pacing on the game, and the art design is certainly breathtaking towards the end of the game. There are plenty of ‘wow’ moments, and a ludicrous amount of beautiful vistas for you to admire. The amount of combat situations is also huge, and each time you play the game you will play it differently, being creative in your methods of beating it.

Crysis also includes a surprisingly stellar multiplayer component. Competing almost directly with Battlefield 2 for the large-scale team-based combat crown, Crysis puts up a damn good fight. The standout game mode (which will be the most remembered) is power struggle. Not many multiplayer games last so long that the sun will set and rise before the match is over.

And that’s Crysis. Even without the graphics, the game is an incredible achievement, providing you with such a variation of gameplay and possibilities for combat while also giving you freedom to experiment and mess around in insanely large open areas. The final act of the game is a huge letdown, swapping this freedom for a Doom style corridor shooter mode, but shouldn’t tarnish what it is. Of course if I did mention the graphics I would note that they are so far beyond any other game on any system out there that it may genuinely be confused for being a game from three or four years in the future. But I won’t, because I have some integrity. And also because, unless you work for NASA, you wont have a PC capable of running Crysis on its highest settings at any more than one frame per second.

Crysis therefore is two games. The first half is an incredible open-ended varied first person experience, while the latter parts of the game end up being Doom 4: Indonesia.