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Your PC better have some power!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 59 / 79
Date: November 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is a comment and not a review. Here are my specs: 2.66 DuoCore2, 4gb ram, and 8600gt running overclocked with nTune. My video card is my weak link on my system no doubt, but I'm shocked I can only run this game on medium at the next to lowest screen resolution. Thats the only setting I can run the game smoothly with NO fullscreen AA or particles on. This game is a system beast so you better have a better card than mine to take advantage of the great effects and graphics because I don't see it. This is getting ridiculous that you have to have a $400 video card to fully enjoy playing a $50 game....crazy!

Crysis...a good FPS but distant runner up for Game of the Year

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 71 / 114
Date: November 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is the long awaited follow up to 'Farcry' (one of the best FPSs of 2004). We now finally get a look at this newest offering.

Here are some of the things that I've liked in the single player mode...

1.)This is a FPS in which your nano armor gives you special 'skills"; these 'skills' include enhanced speed, strength, armor and invisibility; and you'll need them all to survive.

2.)Graphics that are smooth and flowing...plus excellent audio; both add a spooky, creepy ambiance to this jungle based horror game.

3.)The ability to use and control vehicles (on land, at sea and in the air), as well as the mounted weapons on these units.

4.)Generally good (but not great) enemy AI! Although some will just stand out in the open, there are some that will sneak up on you or hide behind cover; also they must reload empty weapons. Due to their larger numbers and the fact they're usually spread out, will necessitate your using your special 'skills' and the surrounding environment to defeat them. This is the basic, reoccurring challenge for this game.

5.)Easy, anytime save/loads with F5/F9 respectively, as well as game generated checkpoint saves.

6.)If your taking a beating (or find it too easy), you can change the degree of game difficulty anytime, as you play; you don't have to start a new game. This is a nice feature!

Cons:

1.)I've had a couple freeze ups, requiring reboot; also some minor video fragmentation (after extended periods of play).

2.)I found the controls on flying the VTOL (vertical take-off & landing) craft were difficult to operate (the plane just didn't seem to respond to commands quickly) with the result of frequent crashes.

3.)There was one extended section where you were floating (in either space or water), that I found confusing, tedious and boring. I was lucky it was very linear, or I might never have gotten out of there.

4.)A high end system is preferable. Although playable on XP, Vista can use Dx10, and combined with good hardware and a high end video card, it does make a difference in being able to run a lot of the 'extra' graphic details.

Conclusion:
All the pre-release hype made it sound as if this game would easily qualify for Game of the Year honors; I don't think so. Graphically it is beautiful and it is a good game, but it's not a great game! If you liked 'Farcry' then you'll probably like 'Crysis'. Was it worth the wait...probably, but somehow I was expecting something more. Over all, I liked 'Farcry' and its gameplay a little more. However, still worth a 4 1/2-5 Star rating.

Incredible but short

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 14 / 16
Date: November 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

In spite of having to run the game on med-low resolution settings I found the game to be excellent. The story flows very well and you never get bored with it. The graphics are excellent, characters are well played for the most part, and the final battle is epic. Even the escort mission (the achillies heal of most games) felt realistic and worked well.

So why 3 stars? I'm taking off .5 because for some reason it won't allow me to map the flight functions to my joystick (wingman extreme). Not that big of a deal since the mouse keyboard does actually work in the game but not very well.

Now for the big hit. I'm taking off 1.5 stars because of the length. I just don't get games these days. They make them with flashy graphics, hopefully a good story, and if it's a really good game it feels epic. However, they make them so short that it just leaves you feeling empty. After the final battle in Crysis I was sitting there waiting for the next section to load when the credits came up. I sat looking confused for a few minutes before I turned the monitor off in disgust.

It's like if they had released Deus Ex and it ended the game after you retrieved the virus or System Shock after you got to the second level of the station or Far Cry after find out about trigens. I brought the game home Friday, played from about 7pm-11pm. Got up the next morning and played from about noon-11PM. I finished the game just after 11PM and I was playing on the hardest difficulty level, took breaks for meals, and ran out to the store to pick up snacks.

It used to be that when you bought a game, you expected to get at least a week of play out of it. Are we now reduced to less than 24 hours? Personally, I'd give up the years worth of work on graphics flash that they spend, for more game time in the story. The multi-player doesn't make up for this either as that's a common excuse.

I loved the game (what little of it there was), but I can't go any higher than 3 stars.

Dirty little secret . . .

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 19 / 25
Date: November 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I love this game, and mostly I agree with the high rating that the game has received. The other reviews have pretty much touched on all of the things I love about it and normally I wouldn't think of chiming in just to pile on more of the same, but I feel there are a few points that were missed . . . points that I think others should know before buying this game.
I have a dual boot computer that runs both Windows XP and Windows Vista Home Premium. (2 SLI linked Nvidia 8800 Ultras, 4GBs of RAM and an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62) I have run the game on both OS's and have found that, all things being equal--using the exact same settings on the same computer with only the OS being different--that the game runs significantly better on XP. I've tried this comparison with quite a few recent titles--titles that run both DX 9 and DX 10--and Crysis shows, by far, the biggest slow down when switching between the two OS's. (I've checked around and it seems that I'm not alone in this discovery) This seems a shame. I kind of expect some problems with Vista--that's the reason I kept XP on my system . . . But I guess I'm willing to cut Crysis a little slack because it IS such an ambitious game.
But then there's another bit of hanky-panky that isn't so forgivable: This is the fact that the game won't let you turn the video settings to "Very High" on XP. At first everyone thought, quite naturally, that this was due to some difference between the relative abilities of DirectX 9 on XP and DirectX 10 on Vista. But it turns out that the limitation is purely artificial. (For those who want to circumvent this, it's an easy fix; simply cutting and pasting a few lines in some config files allows those higher settings on XP. Look around on Google, it's out there . . . ) This isn't to say that there IS no difference between DX 9 and DX 10, only that someone tried to make the difference seem even greater than it really is by inserting an artificial limitation.

All is not lost, the Crysis people are coming out with their first patch in a week or so and I have no doubt that they'll have the game running well on Vista in no time. Maybe they'll even give up on the artificial limit in XP . . . but I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Still, I give it four stars.

Almost, But Not Quite a Great Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 35 / 60
Date: November 24, 2007
Author: Amazon User

System: Dell XPS 410
Duel Core E6600
2gb RAM
Nvidia 640 mb 8800 GTS

I was actually somewhat disappointed in this game, I hate to say. I looked forward to this for over a year.

First the good. Graphics are very good even with the low to medium settings I was required to use because of my system. Audio, for the most part, was excellent. AI was a slight step up from other games in the genre, but not as much as I had expected. The game-play was engaging - at least for most of the game.

The only negative aspect in the graphics and sound department was the tremendous amount of computer power that must be needed to run higher settings. Although I have a mid to high computer system, I was required to run the game at a low resolution with advanced settings set to either low or medium. I couldn't come anywhere close to my monitor's native resolution of 1920 x 1200, even with all settings on the lowest setting.

What was odd is that if I let the game detect and set "optimal" settings, it would select a a medium resolution and high advanced settings. But playing at that, I could only get maybe 12-15 fps. So, the detection system was useless. I had to tweak manually to get the framerate to acceptable levels.

I finally was able to get the framerate at an average of 35-40 fps - which is very acceptable, however, every few minutes, I would hit a "bump" and my framerate would briefly drop to 0 and then bounce back up to the 35-40. Because this was happening so often, I had to take another step back in the graphics department and play on DX9 mode instead of DX10.

It was disappointing to have upgraded my computer to a duel core, 2gb or RAM and a 640mb Nvidia 8800 GTS DX10 graphics card only to run a game on DX9 with low settings and a low resolution. And this was after reading tweak guides, turning off background programs, downloading the latest drivers from Nvidia, etc. Very odd, and I suspect Crysis was rushed out and not optimized correctly.

The story and the characterization were weak in my opinion - characterization more so than the story. This is a fairly straightforward FPS with not a lot happening with character development.

Levels early in the game were much more interesting with more openness and options. As the game progressed, it became more and more linear - to the point of being very limiting.

There were a lot of glitches in the game - items floating around, things spinning. There was a lot of clipping. Some problems became quite a nuisance. For example, getting an objective to clear an area and after doing so just standing there for additional directions. None came and I spent the next ten minutes searching around until I found a hostile in a boxcar just spinning around. He wouldn't die by gunshot, so I had to grab him and throw him to the side. Once he died, it triggered the next script and I got an updated objective.

The last few levels were excruciatingly glitchy. On the ship, I kept falling through the floor to the point that it was extremely hard to complete the objectives. The boss battles were lame. It appeared to me that the game was rushed toward the end and they just threw some things together. The ending was a let down. And the thing is, the game itself was very short - maybe 9 hours or so, I would guess. You'd think they could develop something a little better in a few year's time.

I enjoyed the game, but it just wasn't as good as I had expected. High expectation can do that. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Crysis a solid 8. If it were optimized to run better and without the glitches (which could be possible with some patches in the future) I would up that score to 8.5.

Eye Candy Galore, But Way Too Short

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 23
Date: November 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game feels more like a long demo rather than a complete title. Just when you think the game is going to move onto the next chapter, the soundtrack builds to a crescendo and the credits start rolling. The game abruptly ends after a few hours of gameplay. It seems to me that this game was more of an experiment with the new CryEngine 2 and DirectX 10 support rather than an actual game. As in "The Empire Strikes Back", the storyline in Crysis leaves you hanging. It does not end when the game does! The game ends with your squad leader going AWOL and you have to find him. You know they're going to charge you more money later on to find out what happens when you meet up with him. If people pay the full retail price for a game, shouldn't they get the full game all at once up front? Pay $50 now and wait a year to spend another $40 on an "expansion pack" just to finish the game. What kind of underhanded garbage is that? That should have happened in the first place! If it's not finished, don't sell it!

The audio is atrocious. It's just bad. I mean, the audio in this game is so unsynchronized with the rest of the game that during an in-game movie, the computer *appeared* to freeze, but was just trying to sync the game up with the dialogue. It took about 30 long seconds of waiting to see if the problem was with my computer or not. This is a recurring problem on many other peoples' computers, even with the latest Sound Blaster cards. There have been many times during an intense battle where the sound of the guns has dropped out altogether, and the dialogue is extremely choppy. EA needs to work on a patch for this audio problem. I ran the game with the -DX9 command line parameter to play the game in DirectX 9 mode, and the audio was *STILL* choppy and full of delays.

Please, please wait until the price on this game has gone down. I know you want to see how the game looks with DirectX 10 graphics, but there is a demo of this game available for free online. Crysis is yet another expensive big-name game you can complete over the weekend on the most difficult setting without any cheating (which I did - unless you consider using the quicksave and quickload feature cheating).

****************************************

[Now onto the good stuff - yes, there are good things about this game....]

I really liked the motion blur, and the shading in DX10 is out of this world. I have not seen a more beautifully rendered computer or video game on the market. Even BioShock, which is supposed to support DirectX 10, doesn't come close to the realism of the graphics in this game. The close-ups with the enemy are breathtaking. If you have all the video settings to "Very High" and are running on DX10, when you go toe-to-toe with a bad guy in the middle of the day while on the beach, and decide to melee attack him, it looks so incredibly real that you might forget you are playing a game. The facial expressions are very detailed and well put together. It's just scary real. There was a time in computer/video gaming where you were doing a great job if you used three triangles to make a nose. This is by far light years ahead of those days (and the rest of the competition, for that matter).

The gameplay is good. I love the quick save/quick load feature. I hate when games don't have it. The different abilities of the character's suit are fun, too. Too many bad guys flanking you? Turn the cloak on and retreat. Can't jump high enough to reach that ledge? Use the maximum strength setting and try it now. Need more info on gameplay? Download the demo.

There is no way to upgrade your suit or your character's attributes. This is not one of those kinds of games. One major beef I have with the AI is that they can see me through the thick vegetation that is all throughout the game, but I can't see them. Yes, there are more of them, but even when I move around, they keep shooting at me perfectly, regardless of how many trees there are between me and them. The only real way to hide in this game when you're close to the enemy is to use the stealth mode. When you so much as throw a grenade at them, the stealth mode is deactivated and you are exposed. I can understand the stealth mode deactivating itself when I open fire, but lobbing a grenade? Shouldn't there be a distinction?

The stealth mode is so incredibly useful when you're floating around in the alien ship. The faster you move, the quicker the stealth mode will expire, so when you remain still, it will last much longer than if you are sprinting. Using the stealth mode, I sneak up to the aliens and get close enough to grab them, then I blast them into smithereens, turn the stealth mode back on and do it again.

All in all, a very good half of a game, but we'll have to wait a while to pick up where this game leaves off. Good gameplay, engaging storyline, outstanding graphics, way too short. It'll be a while before we see a Crysis 2. The big wigs are going to milk Crysis by putting out expansion packs, when they should have just made the complete product and sold it all at once. I guess the days of buying a complete game are over (as are the days of getting gas for 89 cents a gallon).

Ignore Mike Powell

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 26
Date: November 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The rater with 3 stars is an idiot, ignore him.

Who cares about multi-monitor, get a nice 21 or 24 inch and you're set. The dialog is pretty good, especially the part where the Koreans speak, you know, Korean (but you can set them to English if you want).

The story is a mix of a special ops kind of game and something Cthulu-inspired, I'll leave it at that.

The suit and its powers are kind of the key to the whole thing. They are sci-fi extensions of what we see now, brief bursts of strength, healing, etc. A little fantastic, yes, but this is a GAME, you know, something where you pick up health packs and what not. Why anybody who picks up a GAME is surprised says something about their intelligence.

The kills are finally difficult. I have always wondered why the hero can take a bunch of rounds, wear all kinds of armor, yet the baddies are cut down in droves. Mr. Mike Powell is just a bad shot. Pump a bunch of sub-sonic rounds into the torso of a Korean soldier wearing body armor, and yes, it's a tough kill. On the other hand, sneak up behind one and put a couple pistol rounds in the back of their head, and that's it. The kills aren't hard, they are realistic.

The AI is very good, but not perfect. Once in a while they seem oblivious, other times they all scurry over to see what the noise is all about. They use a semblance of squad tactics. They try to flank you. And, something very rare, they may even run away if you lay waste to enough of their fellows.

I have a quad-core Intel CPU, 7800 GT card, 2 gigs RAM.....and Windows Vista. It runs like a dream at the highest settings. Mr. Powell apparently failed to read that Crysis is designed for DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. Ooops for him. Trust me, with a good gamer system built in the last 6 months, you will see every leaf and branch moving and reacting, getting brushed aside by your gun barrel, getting shot or blown off, etc.

CoD 4 is nice, but it's just the same old rat maze every other CoD has had. I get tired of having to move along one path and fight endlessly spawning bad guys until I move past a checkpoint. THAT is hokey. Crysis is more like the Rainbow Six games, where there are set numbers of enemies and it's up to you how you want to pick them off. Personally, I just like driving a truck into their camps full bore and leap out guns blazing, but you can snipe them too.

So don't be a Mike Powell - get you a top of the line Vista machine and enjoy Crysis, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed....

Love this game! Well, the first 3/4s of it anyway

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: November 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I tried out the demo for this game, as well as Call of Duty 4 and ended up spending my money on this one. Why? I think it's got way more to offer for the single player experience.

First, a little background. I like realistic, traditional shoot 'em up games. And the more realistic they are, the better I like them. Prior to this I had been playing lots of Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2, all single player mode. I liked these games because they're based on real guns that have imperfections. Guns have limited accuracy, you have to aim down the sights for precision, you have limited ammo, the bullets take time to travel and thus you have to compensate, etc.

Both Crysis and COD4 continue this, but what drew me to Crysis over COD4 is that you can play with tactics. The entire Call of Duty series is based on moving forward, with infinite amounts of enemies replacing the old ones until you move forward. Crysis allows far more sneaking around and taking out your enemies with skill. For me it's thrilling to use stealth and planning to eliminate an enemy crew without risking my own neck, rather than just running in guns ablaze. And when I mess up, they call for backup, but it's not the infinite number of reinforcements like in COD4. There's clearly a finite number of enemies per stage, and I get to decide how to deal with them.

Compare this to basically every other shooter today, where you it's basically run and gun the whole time, and Crysis offers a whole new level of game play. It really feels like I'm on an island where the enemies around me are a real threat, whereas with other games where everything feels fake, the enemy is brain-dead, and I'm just running around shooting at everything that moves. Besides, I don't think I'm good enough for the running and gunning stuff in this game- I tried that the first few times and just kept getting killed. In this regard, Crysis is the most realistic and close to real-life shooter that I've played.

Now the bad part. About 3/4 of the way through, it starts getting really tedious. For me it started with the mission where you're in a tank. The controls for these vehicles are totally unrefined. It's about as bad as the tank missions in Call of Duty 2, except the enemies are stronger and will kill you much faster. Compare this to Battlefield 2, where the tank/helicopter controls are spot on, and Crysis feels totally fake. If BF2 feels like driving a real car, then Crysis vehicles feel like those driving arcade games from the 90's: odd and disconnected. The same goes for the VTOL mission later. Also, one more thing- these levels lacked refinement. There were several times where my VTOL would plain crash after coming out of the cinematic transitions, controls totally unresponsive. Or my tank would end up stuck in a rut I couldn't get out of.

At about this point is where you start fighting the aliens. I won't reveal much more, but fighting the aliens just isn't much fun. It's a lot like the old shooting games where you just have to blast the hell out of them. It's repetitive and tedious. And until you reach the end, it just keeps getting more and more like this. So, first 3/4's of the game I really liked. Then, it got really boring and frustrating.

Finally, as others have mentioned, this game is a total bear on your system. Although I did experience some slowdown in the first parts of the game, it got ridiculously bad at the end. It was so bad I was getting nauseas with the lagging audio and poor frame rate. The last time I got nauseas from a game was when I tried playing a FPS on a projector screen from 2 feet away. My system plays Battlefield 2 (which was the benchmark a year or two ago) with flying colors: maximum quality and resolution with no problem. On Crysis and I'm on lower resolution and quality than I'm used to, and still it gets really slow. And it's not that my system is junk (yet, anyway..)- from what I've read, there isn't a graphics card out there that can play this game at high res and quality. The hardware just hasn't been invented yet.

So, the bad news is, unless you've got a really fast system, get ready for low resolution, quality and frame rates. The good news is, the bad performance doesn't really set in until the later levels, which suck anyway. The other good news is that the demo is a great way to see if you like the gameplay before you buy (and a great way to see if your system can handle the game..)

Awesome game, sadly we wait for the next one.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: December 06, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I want to start by saying, "Next company that makes a game without an ending gets a crowbar to the face." That aside, I found this to be a very good first person shooter as games go.

The game looks good. It seems that this game is the newest release by the company CryTech. You may recall a previous title by the name Far Cry, yeah same people. Crysis makes use of a new gaming engine (CryEngine 2) and is one of the new "Next Gen" games available for both XP and Vista and blah blah blah. Essentially, you can count on it to put your video card in a hammerlock and clock you processor to next week as you play. From what I have seen, this game is built for platforms which may not even exist yet. Not to say that you can't play it on a less than brand new machine, you simply may not enjoy it as much. For reference, I played through with a Intel Core Duo 2.4, Nvidia 8800 GTS and 2 gigs of ram, without any problems.

The game itself is great. Set in the not so distant future (2020) you are a special ops soldier sent into an island somewhere in the south China sea. Originally sent to fight Koreans and rescue some scientists, things get very odd very fast. For more plot check out Wikipedia, but let me assure you it is far more gratifying than the plot of most shooters out there (namely Timeshift).

The interface of the game works well. I didn't have to play with a single config, control or setting throughout the entire game. I find it is always nice to find my buttons, video and sound settings right where I need them from the start.

The only real concept that causes this game to differ from others is the use of the nanosuit. Essentially, it is a set of superpowered battle armor you get the joy of using. For short intervals, it can cloak you, speed you up, give you super strength or simply defend you. This sounded cool from the start, but quickly degenerated into using the same function over and over again as the difficulty of your enemy is amped up to compensate for you powers.

Example: I decide to give myself a bit of super strength to rush up and pound some poor sap into the ground. Result: I am blasted to death before I make it five feet or I find that I am trying to fight the loosing side of a brawl between Halle Berry and a bull elephant. So scratch that power for any reason other than jumping really high.
I was pretty much stuck cloaking myself, running until my battery went dead, then hiding and recharging. This process is repeated until you get close enough to actually hit someone with that wildly gyrating rifle you have been trying to aim for the last hour.

This was my experience on normal skill, which oscillated from pointlessly easy to total unthinking rage against all living things. I would assume that things get only worse on hard, your enemies also stop speaking English on hard for some reason. So, if you are worried about playing an unbalanced game, stop there. This game is nicely balanced against you in every way. Recoil makes any rapid fire attempt laughable and a "realistic" figure 8 sway pattern makes timing a sniper shot a minigame all in its own.

The only shortcoming I had with this game was the length (about 10 hours give or take 2 depending on your anger threshold). Now I understand it is the new thing for developers to get lazy and release games in episodes in order to guarantee future income as well as cut down on development costs (just release the second half years later and call it Episode 2, stupid Valve) but I am getting really tired of paying for demos.

Overall, I have to give this game good ratings. It plays nicely, it keeps you interested and it looks amazing. But after reaching the end you are left flailing in confusion as to what the heck ever happened to the idea of a conclusion. I notice that CryTech has plans for a FarCry 2 but I haven't heard anything for a Crysis 2 yet so it may be a while before anyone gets closure. Great, all of a month after release and I am yelling for a sequel, or at least the second half of my game.

If your computer can handle it.......

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: January 12, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Ok, let's start with what you should have, minimum, to run this game. At least 2 gb RAM but 4 is MUCH better, a new 8800 GT or better video card (and the ones with at least 512 mb) and at least a 2.4 6600 dual core chip on board. Whew! Don't have that? Then wait until you do or you will miss out on the spectacular graphics and detail as you shoot away. This is one busy game, a lot going on and sometimes confusing controls if you are used to other FPSs. Once you get used to it, and you will, it is a cool blend of action and story. The vehicles are great, and you can interact with almost anything. And the AI is VERY good and makes the game VERY tough. An excellent game as long as you have the hardware.

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