Crysis

The Good
This one of the few games where you don't start with a weak weapon and no armor, but an amazing nano-suit with five superpowers at your disposal, it's like having five X-Men mutants in one body (Quicksilver, Colossus, Blob, Mystique and Wolverine). You can comfortably switch between stealth and direct combat and never die easily if you don't get carried away. And the suit automatically switches to maximum armour so you won't suffer a cheap death.

There's so much attention to detail and atmosphere across the island and it's fun to explore. This game has a rare feature almost never seen in an FPS, which is the ability to see your feet, when the camera is angled downwards. Even the music really blends in, changing according to whether you remained undetected, arouse enemies' suspicions or get spotted by them, not unlike the way the music works in Manhunt.

The gameplay really works at its best if you have the right framerate. There's a decent variety of weapons with attachments to make them even more reliable. Secondary objectives to add to the flow of getting your primary objectives done. If the going gets tough, you can save anywhere at any time.

The plot has politics and science fiction put together in just the right spots. Just when you thought you were entering a Call of Duty-styled cold war, you soon find yourself plunged into an alien war almost reminiscent of the Scrin from Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. It would have been nice if the characters were fleshed out a bit more.

The Bad
The worst part of the game is the driving. Driving in jeeps, trucks and boats isn't so bad, even if you have to remember to switch seats to fire the machine gun. Where the frustration lies is the driving of a tank and a VTOL, both of which ruin the fun in the game.

With the tank you have limited shells, which means you have to rely on your partners to do a lot of the enemy tank busting. So many boulders on the ground hinder your movement (sometimes you get completely stuck) and you need a lot of momentum to trek up hills. And the tank is so wide, you can't tell if it can squeeze through a gap or get wedged in it. Driving the tank is like wading in quicksand. Unfortunately you need the tank to get far in the mission, but in a moment of frustration, you'd much rather exit the tank and go on foot, which gives you better control.

The VTOL is just as bad because of the way the flying works, with awkward angles and its hard to get a lock on enemy targets, you might crash before you know it. If you do land roughly, you'll have no chance of getting up again, so you'll need to fly in the sky in one go. With what limited missiles you have, you're not going to get all the secondary objectives easily if at all. Heat-seeking missiles would have been more helpful in this mission.

One other game physic that can ruin a game is that the bodies of your enemies are solid. If you're in prone mode, you can't crawl over a body. Worse if you're caught between a wall with a low ceiling and a body, you're stuck for good. And sometimes falls are a real problem, being as hateful an opponent as the ones you shoot, you'd be wishing the suit could protect you from fall damage.

The Bottom Line
Crysis is not an FPS for the inexperienced. Getting the hang of it would have gone smoother if only there was a proper tutorial guide for utilising the nano-suit's abilities as well as the awful driving and certain physics, which the creators made a bit more realistic than you would have liked. You have to appreciate every ounce of effort put into the game. That iconic nano-suit brought FPS gaming to a whole new level, you cannot say it's been done a hundred times before. The game's reputation earned it the remaster it deserves, but this is the title one must play at least once in a lifetime.