3/5 ★ – administrator's review of Crysis.

[Retrospective Review] I got my first paying job in late 2006. After some pay checks came in, I had bought pizza, drinks, a few bits I needed in life. But I had one goal. Buy a gaming PC that could play the upcoming game, Crysis. I had put together pretty crappy PCs before this, but I distinctly remember wanting to pay someone else to sort everything out for me. I was rich now! I had income! Okay, I wasn't rich. Minimum wage, but that was way more money than I had ever had before. I remember walking into a little PC build store and saying to the mid-20's guy behind the counter that I wanted a gaming PC. He reeled off some cheap components, hoping to confound me with model numbers and throwing phrases like "pixel shader" and "cores" at me. I knew what all these were, I was up on my PC component knowledge. I then clarified that I wanted to be able to run Crysis, and he paused for a moment. Because there weren't really any affordable options for playing the upcoming Crysis - you needed to throw like... over £1k at it. Which nowadays doesn't seem excessive but back then you were getting a lot for that amount of money. He informed me that it would be unaffordable, that I would be looking at spending over a thousand pounds for something like that, that I would need a multicore CPU and a GTX 6800. I looked pretty young back then, I assume he thought I was a young teenager or something without any money. I said "okay." He priced up a PC, I paid my deposit. A week or so later I picked up this PC after paying the rest. He seemed surprised but probably really happy on the markup he earned on that sale. Crysis was released in November 2007, so I had a few months before it came out, but when it did I installed and played it day 1. It ran pretty badly. I couldn't help but be a bit disappointed. The old meme "but can it run Crysis?" (replacing "but can it run Doom3?") exists because at the time, pretty much *nothing* could run it at max graphics. I had it somewhere around medium-high at around 25-35 FPS after MUCH tweaking, and I was happy with it, but I wished I could go even higher. It looked so great maxed out, but it was unplayable at 10ish FPS. Despite the not-maxed-graphics, the first thing that stood out about the game was, of course, the graphics. Holy hell they looked sexy. The trees, the leaf density, the light filtering through the canopy and illuminating foliage. I remember going underwater for the first time and seeing the chromatic aberration when looking up. I was amazed that the developers had bothered with that (and now it's refined, more subtle, and everywhere of course.) I spent way too much time staring at tire tracks in sand which had been bump mapped to look like there was depth when it was only a flat 2d surface. It blew my mind. Eventually I started to actually play the game, and... it was pretty good! I had this whole island to explore, free to roam and destroy at my hea-oh wait, no, I can't roam. I'm locked into specific areas. Ah. What a disappointment. But, onward we go! The shooting worked well, but the suit was absolutely badass. Some of the environment was even destructible. Physics was done surprisingly well, actually. Buildings would collapse, trees would fall and splinter. Engaging your suits "Maximum Strength" mode let you pick up NPCs and launch them at high speed through rusty metal shacks. As you progress through the game, you start to approach outposts and enemy patrols differently. You zip around them so fast they can't even aim at you, you sneak up to them and take them out one by one, invisibly terrorising the remaining bad guy. You throw a steel beam at them and crush them all in one go. You could even get in a vehicle and run them all down. Or, classically, you just shoot the hell out of them. During the game, at around the mid point, a new enemy is introduced. They kept that little twist pretty quiet, and it came as a surprise. Most people, iirc, disliked the new enemy, but I actually enjoyed it. One particular personal highlight when this happens is that a frost appears on all surfaces over the desert island locale - cars and plants and people get frozen, and it looked *so* damn great. In the end though, the game is pretty repetitive. It is a good experience, and at the time you were constantly fighting to get a decent frame rate, but outside of that you're shooting things and moving forward. They story was okay, the sound was okay, the gameplay was pretty fun to mess around with BUT you are overpowered, so it got pretty easy pretty quickly. I guess that's why they changed it up part way through - a risky move that didn't pay off, but I thought it was a good thing. An open-world exploration option would have been good. What held my attention the longest was the graphics. They were a step above and they still look decent now. Which is pretty amazing.