Crysis Warhead Review by Gamespot

Warhead is a fantastic stand-alone expansion to a superb shooter, and should be played by anyone who likes games with guns.

The Good

• The action is focused and intense


• Amazing visuals that look--and run--better than before


• Improved AI makes fighting aliens more fun


• Team Deathmatch has been added, along with a number of great multiplayer maps.

The Bad

• A little too linear at times


• A few remaining AI quirks.

All of the claims you may have heard that Crysis could only run on nuclear-powered supermachines were greatly exaggerated. But if for some reason you worry that this stand-alone companion to the ultragorgeous first-person shooter will bring your PC to its knees, you should know that it's highly scalable and ran smoothly on a number of machines during our testing. It also looks better, with clear attention given to the game's artistic sensibilities and the lusher, denser environments. But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine. Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

If you didn't play Crysis, Warhead's story may be initially confusing, given that you hit the ground running with little exposition. You play as Sergeant "Psycho" Sykes, the brash Brit who was a bit player in the original game. Psycho tends to play by his own rules, always willing to ignore orders and jump into the fray if that's what the situation requires. The story runs parallel to the events of Crysis, though his strident attitude--and a dramatic cutscene near the end of the game--definitely make this Psycho's tale, even if the actual plot remains the same. In any case, you and your US Special Forces team are investigating a tropical island besieged by North Korean invaders. However, your greatest menace comes in the form of aggressive aliens that turn the luxuriant jungles and glowing beaches into a frozen wasteland. You and your teammates, clad in nanosuits that grant you special abilities such as super strength, temporary cloaking, super speed, and additional armor, confront both threats across a variety of large environments.

Psycho's brazen confidence does more than just establish a gutsy protagonist: It sets the stage for a more focused and intense series of battles that keep the pace moving more smoothly than before. Warhead still offers some of the same kind of sandbox levels, but thoughtful enemy placement and map bottlenecks keep downtime to a minimum. You can approach assaults on beachfronts and Korean encampments in a number of ways, so if you're a stealth enthusiast, you can employ your suit's cloak setting and sneak in, or attach a silencer to your sniper rifle and take out your human foes from a distance. If you would rather employ hit-and-run tactics, you can jump into the heat of battle, cause a ruckus, and use your suit's speed function to zoom away. However, Warhead is clearly focused on the guns-blazing approach, gently nudging you into full-on encounters with its mission objectives, character dialogue, and level design. When you reach primary and secondary destinations, you'll get besieged by large numbers of enemies, both human and (later on) alien. Given that human foes also don nanosuits, they're not necessarily quick to fall; as a result, these sequences are exciting and challenging, and you'll need to use your suit abilities and cover opportunities to your advantage. The easily triggered explosions of enemy vehicles and hazardous barrels further intensify these pockets of activity.

A number of set-piece battles confirm this slight shift toward action-packed mayhem. Your first encounter with a hulking alien war machine may not have the same impact as a similar one in Crysis, but it happens earlier than you'd expect, and it establishes the alien presence with adrenaline-fueled drama. That battle is a wonder, as is a later defensive mission that has you fending off a series of aliens, and requires you to shift focus frequently and use every weapon in your inventory. Another great sequence is a train level that, at first, seems much like similar sequences in a number of other shooters. You can stay on the train and use turrets to gun down the opposition, as expected--but you can also jump off and engage the opposition at any time, giving even this near-cliche sequence plenty of replay value. A linear journey through an underground mine is the obvious misstep in regard to level design, given that it never so much as hints at the open-ended action that makes Warhead a superb shooter.

If you played only that level, you also wouldn't see the host of improvements that power the action, particularly the improvements to alien artificial intelligence. The general design means that these robotic rivals will occasionally still be floating around above you, but they have more obvious smarts now, and they find ways to pummel you with ice pellets while remaining just out of sight, staying on the move, and using cover more often. Human enemies also seem more aware of their surroundings, flank you more often, and activate their nanosuits' armor to minimize damage. They also use the limited visibility that the jungle affords them quite well, hiding in brush to stay just out of sight. There are some remaining problems, particularly if you take potshots from a distance. Occasionally, the AI won't react when you snipe at an enemy, and foes using turrets will sometimes let you walk right up behind them. On the whole, however, Warhead makes clear improvements over the original in this regard, which in turn makes for better combat overall.

Vehicles feel sturdy, which is just as well, because you'll be driving them often, either to cover ground more quickly, or just to take pleasure in mowing down enemies with your mounted weapons. You can have a good deal of fun blazing a trail through the jungle while showering your foes with steel death, and the destructible environments further exaggerate the devastation. A scene in which you speed across the tundra in a hovercraft is done particularly well, offering a good sense of speed but pushing you into enemy hotbeds, giving you the chance to stop and fight or zip away with a quick glimpse of Koreans riddling aliens with bullets.

The improved vehicle handling is also noticeable on one of the new multiplayer maps, on which two teams battle in--and out of--the tanks and helicopters scattered about. This is good stuff, and it showcases Warhead's new Team Instant Action mode, a mode noticeably missing from the original Crysis. It's just good old Team Deathmatch, but it's done well, and the maps are improvements on those of the original. Snipers are still a threat, but the size of the maps are better suited to deathmatch battles, and more thought and care seem to have gone into small but important factors, such as weapon-cache placements and player spawns. The Instant Action and Power Struggle modes are still accounted for, and many of the original maps return, offering a large suite of online options that make online Warhead combat more appealing than its predecessor. Note that unlike Crysis, the expansion requires the online component to be installed separately, and isn't accessible from the single-player game.

Both online and off, Warhead is a beauty. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. A test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Don't overlook the improved art design, though, which surpasses the original's oft-sterile look thanks to several striking vistas, such as one featuring an icy naval vessel stranded in the frozen tundra. The audio is almost as terrific. Various creaks and groans make heading down a narrow glacial pathway all the more harrowing, and weapons sound appropriately powerful. The voice acting is strong, and the understated soundtrack sets the right tone without ever getting in the way.

Warhead's single-player campaign should take you no more than six hours or so to complete, but not only does it invite multiple play-throughs, it costs only $30--and doesn't require you to own the original. In other words, there is no reason why anyone with a capable PC shouldn't play Crysis Warhead. It's more focused, it's more intense, and though it doesn't provide as much of the sandbox feel as Crysis veterans would wish for, it still delivers on every other front. Play this game.

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Crysis PC Game - Comix Review by Dumdeedum

Comix style review by Dumdeedum. You might enjoy this one :)



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Crysis PC Game - Review from GameSpot

Here is another review of the most anticipated PC game of the year - Crysis. This time the review comes from GameSpot

It was hard not to be completely impressed when the first images and videos of Crysis appeared about 18 months ago. Scenes of lush jungles and towering alien war machines looked light-years beyond what seemed possible. Of course, the two questions that revolved around Crysis since its announcement were whether it would deliver on those visuals and whether it would deliver a game worthy of those fancy graphics. It turns out that the answer to both those questions is a resounding yes, as Germany's Crytek has proven that its 2004 hit Far Cry was no fluke. In fact, it was just the beginning from this studio. With its sophomore effort, Crytek has managed to deliver an incredibly advanced and exciting first-person shooter that practically rewrites the rules for the entire genre.

 

  Welcome to the prettiest jungle that you have ever seen in a game. Notice that it's starting to snow?

Crysis is an alien invasion game set in the year 2020. An archeological team on a remote Pacific island is captured by an invasion force of North Koreans, and your US Special Forces team is dispatched to investigate and rescue the scientists. Clad in high-tech nanosuits capable of boosting your strength, speed, and armor, as well as cloaking you temporarily to the enemy, you're parachuted into a tropical paradise that's crawling with intelligent enemies and something else that's tearing both the North Koreans and US forces to shreds.

Like Far Cry, the first half of Crysis is essentially a "sandbox" game where you're put in the middle of incredibly large levels and tasked with an objective. How you get the job done is pretty much entirely up to you, which is part of the brilliance of the game's design. For instance, the environments are big enough to give you a wide range of latitude. Do you have to get to a certain point on the map? You can take a meandering route that avoids patrols and go stealthy, or try the up-front approach and try to blast your way through, with the danger of enemy reinforcements showing up. Need to infiltrate a North Korean-held village? You can try the front gate, or maybe explore and find a quieter way in.

Couple these huge environments with the powers of the nanosuit, and you have a ton more options. You can play like the eponymous character from the movie Predator and use your cloaking abilities to stalk North Korean patrols, picking them off one by one and watching the survivors react in confusion. That could be via a silenced rifle, or simply coming up from behind a guard and grabbing him by the throat and hurling him off a cliff, or through the roof of a building, or against a tree, or whatever catches your fancy. Enhanced speed and strength give you an amazing amount of mobility, so you can vault atop buildings and come down behind someone, or run up against a North Korean vehicle next to a cliff and push it over the side. In a heartbeat you can switch between different roles, from stealthy assassin to seemingly unstoppable death dealer. It's a game that makes you feel like a superhero, though not an invincible one, because you simply can't run roughshod over the enemy. Crysis rewards smart, fast thinking.

 

  The firefights are stunning, as well as challenging, whether you're tackling North Korean soldiers or alien war machines.

It helps that the game features a high degree of advanced physics and destructibility in a highly dynamic world. Getting caught in a firefight in the jungle is a cinematic treat, thanks to the way the bullets will chop down trees, while branches sway from impacts. This isn't just a visual effect, either, as falling timber can kill if it lands on someone. There's all sorts of emergent behavior like that throughout the game, events that spring up completely unintended or unforeseen. In one instance, the flaming wreckage of a chopper landed on a hut, crushing it and killing all those inside.

Meanwhile, the gunplay and ballistics modeling make this shooter feel as if you're handling real weapons. Trying to hit a target at long engagement ranges is challenging thanks to weapon recoil and other factors. The North Koreans are encased in body armor, so they take some time to gun down, unless you aim for the head, which usually puts them on the ground. At your disposal is a variety of firearms, like shotguns and assault rifles. One of the neat aspects of the game is that you can fix up your weapons on the fly, adding scopes, silencers, and grenade launchers, provided you've found them. There are trade-offs for each add-on. Silencers let you take down guys quietly, though they reduce bullet damage, meaning you've got to make every shot count. Or flashlights mounted on your weapons might help you out in dark levels, but will give you away.

 

  It's not just infantry combat, as you can hop into almost every vehicle in the game, as well as take part in an incredible tank battle.

Crysis gives you all of these toys and ratchets the action higher and higher the deeper you get into it. The first level of the game introduces you to the sandbox combat and the nanosuit. From then on, the battles become larger and more intense as the action escalates. You'll storm North Korean-held villages and bases; encounter their counter to your nanosuit; take part in a chaotic assault on a North Korean harbor; and from there the game accelerates. Next is a wild tank battle in a tropical mountain valley, with helicopters and jet fighters roaring overhead. There's a sheer rush as your tank plows through vegetation and knocks down trees as missiles and tank fire erupt all around you. Meanwhile, the vehicle explosions are convincing, right down to the way ammunition cooks off and sends spirals of smoke outward. It's visual poetry of destruction. You're not confined to your tank the entire time, either. You can jump out at any time and use your suit powers and rifle to take on enemy infantry. When they're dead, pick up their dropped rocket launchers and engage vehicles in a cat-and-mouse-style game.

As events in the game continue to ramp up, you'll find yourself inside the alien ship, the zero-gravity environment delivers a visually strange and yet wondrous setting. As you navigate through the environment and engage the aliens you have to figure out your way through the level. Escape the alien ship and you're tossed into a frozen environment against the alien foe. After the alien vessel, the game becomes less free form and more linear, but it also amps up the action along the way, reflecting the way that the stakes are being raised. Now you're trying to fight your way out of the alien sphere, which means dodging war machines that look like something from The Matrix. There are a few more surprises in store from that point before you get to the ultimate showdown.

 

  The alien environment feels appropriately otherworldly, and it feels like you're under the sea.

The one criticism that can be leveled on the story is that it leaves you screaming for more. While there's an adrenaline-packed finale, you still don't want the game to end on the note that it does. The single-player campaign is around eight to 10 hours long, which is a healthy amount for a shooter. There's a lot of replay here, too, as you can experiment with a multitude of different approaches. Plus, it's fun to go back and try out the large, set-piece battles again and again, since they can unfold in different ways thanks to the dynamic nature of the combat and the artificial intelligence.

Speaking of which, the AI is generally excellent in a fight, as enemy soldiers use cover and concealment effectively. They also know how to lay down suppressing fire and are great at tossing grenades to flush you out of hiding. Getting in a firefight in the jungle with these guys is always fun, because they'll make you work for it at the default normal difficulty setting. (However, the AI can suffer from the same problem all shooters seem to have; mainly that bad guys sometimes don't know what's going on down the road from them.) When you take damage, find cover and your armor and health will regenerate. If you die, you reload to the last checkpoint or quick save. Meanwhile, Crysis includes a special hard mode called delta, which is a lot of fun, because rather than making the game tougher by cheating and giving the bad guys more powerful weapons, delta takes away some of the gameplay crutches that help you at lower difficulty levels. For instance, incoming grenades are no longer highlighted, so you've got to pay attention now, and your health regeneration is slower. And the best part about delta is that all enemy soldiers speak fully in Korean, so unless you understand Korean, you're going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what they're planning to do.

The single-player game is a considerable accomplishment by itself, but Crytek has also included a full-featured multiplayer mode called power struggle that combines the best of the Battlefield games and Counter-Strike. The goal in power struggle is that each 16-man team (for 32 players total) must destroy the opposing team's base, but to do so they have to construct alien weaponry at a central prototype facility. To power the prototype facility, though, both teams need to seize and hold power stations throughout the map. In addition, there are bunkers and factories that can be captured; capturing a bunker allows your team to spawn in forward positions, while capturing a factory allows you to purchase vehicles that can help your side. Whenever you help your team by killing the enemy or seizing an objective, you gain points that can be used to purchase more advanced weapons, vehicles, and gear. It's an excellent multiplayer mode, and it comes with five large maps to support it. Keep in mind that everyone has their suit powers as well, so in addition to all the running and gunning and vehicle driving, there's plenty of leaping and speed running and cloaking going on.

 

Power struggle is Battlefield meets Counter-Strike meets the powers of the nanosuit.

Then there's instant action, which is essentially deathmatch with nanosuit powers. This is a chaotic mode set in some stunning levels, including what feels like a fully modeled Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. You can run around the flight deck, a good chunk of the hanger deck, and many of the corridors. Weapons are strewn about everywhere in instant action, so it's just a crazy melee of shotguns, snipers, rocket launchers, or nanosuit-enhanced fists. However, a team deathmatch mode is missing, which seems odd. Team deathmatch would have been a welcome addition, since it would have instilled some kind of teamwork into an otherwise free-for-all frenzy. Finally, Crysis multiplayer features built-in voice support, which means that all you need is a microphone to talk to your fellow players and teammates in power struggle.

Graphically, Crysis looks photorealistic at times--it's that amazing. Crytek has managed to achieve a visual fidelity that blows away anything seen to date, and there are countless moments when you'll just stop and gape at what you're seeing. Sometimes it's just the ordinary, like the setting sun casting all sorts of shadows and rays through the jungle canopy. Other times, it's something epic, like watching a huge alien war machine stomping toward you. The impressive aspect of the graphics is just how it manages to render huge, open, dynamic, interactive levels. Everything looks amazing up close or far away. Interacting with your squadmates lets you gaze upon the mechanical sinews of their nanosuit, or the incredible facial animation that brings them to life. They're capable of the subtlest of facial gestures to help convey emotion. Then you can sit on a ridge and peer down using binoculars to a village a kilometer away, scouting the location of the patrolling guards and machine gun posts. The sheer fact that many of the trees and buildings are destructible just adds a level of realism that's staggering.

You'll need a fairly high-end system to make the game look its best. In that regard, Crysis really does embody everything that's both exciting and daunting about PC gaming. A dual-core CPU and the latest generation of video card can run the game at maximum detail settings capably, though you have to lower the resolution a bit to do so. It's doubtful that a system has been built yet that can run the game at ultra-high resolutions with all the graphical sliders maxed out. Dial down the detail settings to high, which is the next-lower setting, and Crysis still blows contemporary games out of the water. Results are a bit mixed at medium and low settings, though. At the lowest detail settings, objects pop in and out with a fair degree of consistency. It's annoying at best and frustrating at worst, as it can impact gameplay. Crysis does support both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, though the latter requires you run the game using Windows Vista. The visuals in DX9 are impressive, but they really come to life in DX10, provided you have the hardware.

 

  This is a backwoods redneck's worst nightmare: North Koreans, aliens, and a tornado.

The game also sounds fantastic, from the primordial "moans" that the island periodically releases, the soft crunch of dirt and branches under your feet, and all the background sounds that you'd expect in the middle of the jungle. Turn on your suit's cloak, and everything sounds muffled. The music, by composer Inon Zur, feels inspired by the scores from epic Hollywood action movies, while the voice acting is also excellent, helping to deliver some distinct characters and even a little humor.

If you put it all together, Crysis is just remarkable. This is a game that pushes the envelope in terms of both technology and gameplay and does so with aplomb. Crysis raises the expectations for every shooter to follow when it comes to graphics, interactivity, environments, immersiveness, AI, and gameplay. Quite simply, Crysis represents the first-person shooter at its finest, most evolved form.

Crysis PC Game - Review from CVG

First game critics reviews are begining to come out. Here is a review published by CVG. 

What makes a truly great action movie? It's a desperate John McClane jamming some C4 beneath a monitor and experimentally kicking it down a lift shaft on a swivel chair. It's Indy telling Sallah "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go" before instinctively tearing after a Nazi truck.

It's all about a hero living on his wits, making life or death decisions on the fly and the world hinging on his actions. Crysis encapsulates this, it thrives on putting the onus on you to create your own brand of action and adventure in its stunningly beautiful locations. You and the game can haphazardly create moments of such gaming brilliance that often you pretty much have to stand up and applaud.

What makes a decent, but unremarkable, action movie? It's heroes outrunning climactic explosions. It's an over-reliance on special effect brouhaha that rides roughshod over any of this vital spark of humanity.

Sadly, the final act of Crysis encapsulates this too. Crysis is an astounding achievement, a game worth upgrading for and something for us to treasure - but it certainly isn't perfect. Still, we've had some good times...

POWER UP
Suddenly caught in flagrante slap-bang in the middle of a dirt track without my stylish Predator-esque cloak, a passing jeep with a rear-mounted machine gun begins to take advantage of my predicament.

Leaping behind a nearby sturdy palm tree, I pause to gather my thoughts - but that gunner keeps gunning. Suddenly the trunk of my sanctuary splinters, and I sit there paralysed by a bizarre mixture of fear and delight as the tree in front of me slowly and inexorably begins to tilt, then fall - leaving me staring down a delighted Korean's gun barrel with nothing but my imminent death in mind. I scream with joy.

I just have so many of these excitably expressed war stories I could regale you with. Times when equal measures of my stupidity, cunning and luck coalesced into 100 per cent proof fun. Like picking up a carelessly discarded outboard motor, turning on my super-strength and bouncing it off the head of an angry Korean soldier - only to watch it bounce over a large rock and accidentally crush his best mate as a bonus.

Or jumping into a jeep, wondering what the hell to do with the guy manning the machine gun in the seat behind me - then ploughing into a shed, colliding with the struts holding it up, causing the roof collapse and leaping out just as everything went up in a fireball.

Or with my dying breath tossing a grenade into a sniper's watchtower at that perfect angle and seeing it collapse perfectly in on itself and crumple to the ground.
Or sneaking up behind two patrolling soldiers while cloaked, grabbing the rear one then pelting off into the undergrowth with the sole intention of bouncing him off a rock and into the sea.

All brilliant moments of FPS fun seemingly coming out of nothing at all.

SLIGHT RETURN
What surprised me most when playing Crysis though, was just how similar it is to Far Cry (a similarity no doubt aided and abetted by the fact that a fair amount of what Crytek intended for Crysis appears to have hit the wayside).

As the game stands though, this is no bad thing: this is a rebuilt, more powerful Far Cry for the new generation of hardware. Many of its levels are even rethought variations on what went before - notably one map with a heavily fortified base perched on a rock outcrop in the middle of a valley that apes Far Cry's third level without a care in the world.

It's a condensed version (I smelt the roses on the way and clocked in at around 11 hours) with some remarkable new features replacing the duff interior sections - and an almighty few shifts in gear two-thirds of the way through intent on keeping you hooked until the end.

Something that certainly wasn't the case with Far Cry, a game that only myself and the sadomasochists that live next door ever fought through.

That's not to say that Crysis is forgiving though; to kick off with it seems mercilessly hard. For the first three hours, amid the giggles, the going is extremely tough - with you seemingly permanently cowering behind small lumps of rock while Korean bullets try to carve you into new and interesting shapes.

The key to beating this difficulty curve is the mastery of the nanosuit - which is not only vital to your continuing survival, but also to the amount of joy you can get out of the game.

You play as a chap called Nomad, a gruff military sort who only speaks when in direct proximity to plot. You and your (steadily disappearing) squadmates are gifted with muscle-hugging nanosuits that make you the first line of offence in any international squabble.

It's eerily similar to Halo's Master Chief setup actually - not least when you're being bawled at by gruff US military types or being the super-charged backbone of full-on military vehicle assaults.

The nanosuit itself is accessed through pressing down on your mousewheel and, with an increasing aspect of second nature, nudging in the required direction for speed, strength, invisibility or shielding.

Of these shielding is most vital in terms of death avoidance, it means that your suit will sap your energy reserves to let it soak up two or three shots before any skin gets pierced, and as such is generally your neutral mode.

Invisibility, well that's where you get to feel like the Predator. Only applicants with the very finest of eyesight get into the army of Kim Jong Il these days, and even the briefest flash of your hide can have klaxons blaring, distress flares being fired far into the air and a collection of badasses being ferried in by helicopter.

Strength, meanwhile, is the most fun (yet least used) power - letting you leap onto roofs, punch through the walls of wooden structures and, yes, even punch jeeps. As for speed - well that does what it says on the nanotin.

GO-GO GADGET
How does your average action burst play out then? Take the seaside village you infiltrate/invade on a rescue mission early in the game.

As an eager and over-exuberant conscript my initial policy was to charge in with a van and run some people over, steal a rocket launcher, make some holes in my surroundings, take a ponderous moment to select super-strength, murder a Korean man with a shopping trolley and then end up cowering inside a nearby JCB's scoop as 20 or so extremely angry orientals converged on my position.

Now, having completed the game and become a nanosuit veteran, that all seems faintly embarrassing - as if I've seen a picture of myself in 1993 with my hair in curtains and wearing a lumberjack shirt.

You see, after completing the game you feel compelled to return to these old haunts and, if you'll forgive the phrase, pwn them. Really put in a bit of showboating. Returning to this mission I tagged all in sight with my binocs, stuck a silencer on my pistol, dabbled with the firing modes on my rifle, unthinkingly cloaked myself, moved myself from cover to cover, snuck past the sentries and began to take out the red menace from within.

Every time they caught sight of me I'd slip into speed mode and dart around a corner, sit still to recharge my power batteries and then become invisible again only to reappear somewhere they'd never suspect.

On a first play of Crysis you feel that the odds are entirely stacked against you, but the deeper you go, you become increasingly aware that despite the challenge, you do have the facility to start toying with enemies like a cat constantly releasing, then recapturing a half-dead rodent.

Obviously, at some point you will always bring the high explosives out to play and start instigating trolley death, but the Korean sections of Crysis make it the most replayable shooter I've ever played. And as for the feeling of having two final bad guys running after you in a freshly decimated base, having unlimited breathing space to concoct inventive deaths for the poor souls is a paramount joy.

As you move from seaside restaurant, to fortified village, to military base and onwards to shipyards and mortar-pocked harbours I'd be lying if issues did not arise. Enemy AI is either very good or absolutely pig stupid - and very little lies in between. Grunts manning vehicle machine guns are lost as to what to do when you're close by, while those on gun emplacements are often oblivious to World War III breaking out a couple of metres behind them.

Every now and then you come across a soldier who just clearly doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing (but then again if a six foot man in a grey muscle suit had just decloaked near me and was about to reach for my throat - well I guess I'd look a bit dazed too).

Something that really surprised me though was that the vehicles just aren't
as much fun to use as they were in Far Cry. This is presumably because Crysis' vehicles have been designed with its 'CS meets Battlefield' Power Struggle mode in mind (see box left) - and the added realism and more cumbersome handling that this brings just lessens the feelings of freedom and fun.

Compared to the sheer delight of charging down a river taking out multiple helicopters with your ultra-manoeuvrable speedboat in Far Cry, doing something similar with a big old dinghy in Crysis just isn't as thrilling. I mean, what's even the point of being given the option to sit in the back seat of a jeep when on a solo mission?

The Koreans aren't just here bullying local archaeologists and building military installations for shits and giggles though they're here to dabble with forces that they cannot begin to comprehend.

As premises go, it's a faintly familiar yet excellent one, but don't start expecting any narrative cleverness or characters who do much beyond move the plot from one stage to the next. Crysis is the anti-BioShock - and never pretends to be anything else.

I mean, one of your fellow squadmates is an English chap called Psycho (who's sadly no relation to Stuart Pearce) whose dialogue contains more 'wanker's, 'bloody's, 'f***'s and 'bollocks' than are edited out of the average episode of Jeremy Kyle.

To be fair though, this never really becomes a major issue - mainly because Crytek are far more keen on expressing their world to you through the things you see and the things you do. Like standing among a tank convoy staring up at a gigantic distant mountain and hearing the distant rumble as its insides start to churn, and huge chunks fall from it into the valley below. Or when you first meet the aliens.

PARADISE LOST
Oh yeah, the aliens. I'd almost forgotten. As I've previously mentioned, the men behind Crysis have built it to tease and entice throughout - even 'gasp!' by pulling a bit of a Xen trick halfway through. Now I need you to be aware that I will start bitching in a little while, but I admit that at first this is a fairly successful ruse.

After levels that have plonked you into tank assaults and a frantic one-man attack on an open mine, the moment you nervously approach the strange, organic wonder that is the long-buried alien structure is priceless. The moment at which you find yourself in zero-G (and here's to the cheekily psychic nature of US military tech designers for the boosters on my suit!) is a real pleasure, and the first appearance of your squid-like foe genuinely terrifying.

This amazing level may end in a confusing manner, but is magisterial simply because everything is so, well... alien. It's like being trapped in an ant nest, and aware of the beauty of its hive of activity but being incapable of knowing what's going on. As for the combat, well it's quite fun - but the intergalactic squids sure ain't no Koreans.

If you didn't realise that the aliens next move is to cause a little mischief with the tropical thermostat then you've been hibernating.

Visually, the frozen jungle is stunning. It's here that you come across your alien friends all kitted out in their winter best, dropped off by giant flying metal kraken-beasts like a mum leaving her kids at school: humming, ice-dagger firing exoskeletons that can leap in the air and, with a neat tilt, fire themselves in your direction in a flash of spinning blades.

Thing is though, fun as it certainly is at first, after a while of this you first realise that Crytek have suddenly got you playing a different game. And that game is Medal of Honour: Alien Assault.

Everything you learnt and loved in the first half of the game becomes a sequence of ally-protection missions, sitting in the back of jeeps firing at the air-squids overhead, sitting in anti-aircraft guns and knocking even more of the threat from the sky, a truly awful level in which you pilot a craft that handles like a bin van with wings... the list goes on. I found myself sitting there wondering what exactly had happened to all the fun I used to have with my Korean friends.

Now what I'm about to say could be considered a spoiler, and it is I suppose, but it will make yours a happier playing experience if you realise that after the crappy flying level, where you end up is the last level. And yes, I realise that it will all look very familiar from stuff you've seen in the gaming press before, but this place is honestly the setting for a whole bunch of too-ing, fro-ing and disappointing boss battles that deliver little more than the initial wow factor.

And as for the actual moment it ends - Jesus Christ! Forget crap Call of Duty endings, forget even Far Cry - the desultory 'here comes the sequel or, more likely, the expansion!' sequence Crysis ends on is an outright kick in the teeth.

BACK IN BLACK
Which makes it all the more lucky that the first thing I did having completed the game was start running through my quicksaves and getting back to the free-form goodness I was revelling in but four hours earlier.

Bullying the toads and moorhens I came across, causing more of those explosions that were simply to die for, rootling through people's fridges, simultaneously living on the very edge of my wits and the seat of my pants. I don't begrudge Crytek for including all that alien stuff, but it sits at such complete right angles with what has gone before that it can't help but jar.

They're simply not quite as good at creating scripted action as they are action-bubble delights, and when they're so good at the latter, the fact sticks out like a sore, frozen alien thumb-appendage.

Crysis is a graphical marvel, it boasts the best application of physics I've ever come across and, in the nanosuit, a gimmick that genuinely brings something original and exciting to the table.

A long time ago I signed off a review that called Far Cry the beating heart of the FPS, and this is a tradition that has been held true. Despite its occasional lapse, it is a game with a taste of the future - of what can and will be done with PC gaming.

Despite the bathetic bombast of its close, at its root it recognises that it's the gamer who's star of the show. Not the graphics, not the physics, not the jungle - just you stuck in the middle, making it up as you go...