A Holiday of Gaming: Entry 1
By SteveWith a week off, I figured I’d catch up on my backlog of games. Some old, some new. Some borrowed, some… blah
First up, Crysis.
Oh dear.
I wanted to love it, I really did.
My most anticipated game of the year turns out to be my biggest disappointment. The people that gave it such high reviews must either dig the multiplayer or have stopped playing about mid-way through the game. Because for its first half, it’s the greatest sandbox combat simulator ever, 100% worthy of its 98s and 5-stars, and 10/10 cups of drool.
You can create these amazing stories, like the time I was being chased by a helicopter, cloaked, ran into a building… and then the helicopter started launching rockets into all the buildings, eventually hitting mine, causing it to collapse on my head and kill me. That’s not a scripted scene like you find in Call of Duty 4. (More on that one later.) Another favorite was driving my Hummer into a village, hop out, let it roll into the middle, then shoot out its rather conveniently placed above-bumper-placed gas can and have the vehicle explode into a fiery ball, taking out half the soldiers. I did that twice.
But once it hits the “zero-g” segment, crikey. That entire stretch is a total momentum killer. (And to think I’d signed up a cover story just to reveal this segment; it would have been our June issue, I believe.) Poor controls, vague objectives, confusing and boring layouts. There’s even a stretch where you get to sit around for a few minutes waiting.
And once you emerge from this boring stretch, you’re hit with chaos. And not the good kind of chaos, like you get in a firefight. It’s the kind where you die and have no idea how or why. You also get stretches where your framerate dips into the single digits. You get boss fights that are comically bad. You get a horrible flying segment. You get… oh, forget it. It’s just terrible from start to finish. Some of the gameplay segments appear to be engine showcases more than good design decisions. (“Look, see? We can do that! Sign up our engine today!”)
Why doesn’t Crytek trust the brilliance of its core gameplay? This game could have been escalating military action from start to finish and been “Game of the Year” material. Instead, it’s just another shooter too obsessed with throwing “new stuff” at the player every hour.
December 26th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Have to agree. I bought Crysis and even upgraded my system to see it. I was having a blast while in the forest and running around the island. Playing with the suit and trying different ways to attack a village or hardened nest was just great. Then you get into the zero g. I have to say I just can’t build up any interest to boot it up and continue playing. It is exactly what happened with me once I went indoors in FarCry. Crytek just needs to feel comfortable with their military play and expand on that instead of adding these supernatural elements.
If it moved to more tank missions, or large village infiltrations to find secret information or assassinations, that would so expand upon the gameplay.
December 27th, 2007 at 1:50 am
My most anticipated game of the year
Really?
The people that gave it such high reviews must either dig the multiplayer or have stopped playing about mid-way through the game.
Far Cry had less than one half that was useful. In those situations, I say it’s best to just replay the good parts rather than plow through the sludge. Thanks for the advice. When I hit the boring bits, I’m turning around.
I still don’t even know when I’ll get Crysis. Right now, I haven’t even finished Sam & Max Season One (nor bought Call of Duty 4 on Steam) or Super Mario Galaxy because of Future Pinball. I’m playing hour long games on EM recreated tables and originals that have me more addicted than Pokemon back in the 90s. And there are lots of tables to collect too! =(
(my normal gaming life is temporarily over)
But more on the subject of Crysis, I have a question:
Do the levels get even bigger & more “mini” open ended than Far Cry’s island levels, or is it about the same? I loved the stealth (I’m a sucker for good stealth) and the sniping from really long distances with stealth (I’m a sucker for anything sniper related too – especially stealth sniping; it’s like a trifecta [awesomeness makes the third part]) and the way you could keep playing the levels with different results… But, of course, the game eventually ran out of interesting locations to play out all those scenarios.
Am I still presented with multiple semi-linear paths, or is it more like a Battlefield map in singleplayer where you can go anywhere & have the AI respond in different ways each time?
If not, I guess I’ll go through the motions (happily, but without much brain activity) while I wait for Far Cry 2 and its interesting, STALKER-like design ideas obviously doomed to some form of redesign.
And as almost always, I must apologize for being incoherent in the middle of the night while I type this.
PRE-POST EDIT:
It is exactly what happened with me once I went indoors in FarCry.
To be fair, Crytek’s patches eventually made the latter two thirds of Far Cry more bearable. I wouldn’t say they were good, but they were at least vaguely enjoyable when you didn’t play on the higher difficulty levels. (I did… stupid me)
December 27th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
I love sandbox games, so yeah… Crysis was on the top of my list of games I wanted to check out. (Also, my rig is powerful enough to handle it with max detail, though not at my native LCD resolution.)
Gyro, you may not dig Crysis as much because you don’t really get a superduper awesome sniper rifle. I suspect having one would break the game, as you’d just go invisible, snipe (which breaks you out of invisibility), wait for your suit to recharge, and disappear again.
You can already do that, and it’s a blast. (And I played it that way a lot, once I figured out it was the safest way to deal with lots of bad guys.) But you have to get in a lot closer, or be an extremely good aim and get head shots exclusively. I could often get off a nice shot with a suppressed weapon, but most enemies require more than one hit to take down later in the game.
The first half is very non-linear. You can avoid a lot of combat, and there are optional objectives that take you to different villages along the way. But it’s always clear where you need to go and how to get there.
I replayed a lot of the earlier missions over-and-over just to get a good feel for how they should play out. And because I wanted to perfectly execute my plan. (And typing this, I kinda wish it had a little mission builder for skirmishes. Like, “Place X soldiers in this area, and if they here you coming they bring X more soldiers.”)
I think Crysis could have sustained its awesomeness without the aliens, because it gave you more tools to play with because of your power suit. And like Craig mentioned, it could have added more interested objectives (how about an assassination that doesn’t trigger an alarm as a “final boss”)