Now if you’re done collecting your jaw…

With the madness of September and October behind us, one would have hoped to find some time to sit down and breathe. But do the folks at Crytek love to prove us wrong! Crysis is due out November 16, while the single-player demo was supposed to flood gamers’ desktops with happiness way back on the-day-nothing-happened. Fortunately, the demo finally found its way to the light, on the 26th of October.

The Multiplayer demo had slipped out with much less fanfare a few weeks ago. Concerns were raised over graphics and performance, and dark clouds were beginning to gather in gamers’ minds: Was the game over-hyped? Will the factors of the Valenzetti Equation never change? Are we all doomed to die and burn in hell?! The answers lie ahead… Some of them, at least.

Crysis puts you in the shoes and nano-suit of United States Delta Force operative Jake Dunn. The demo begins with a pre-rendered cinematic that shows off the powers bestowed upon you by the nano-suit, and all the (not so) crazy stuff you can do with them. It sets the tone for the game, and shifts the spotlight to the nano-suit which has been all but ignored up until now. As the real game kicks in, you find yourself staring at the faces of the four other (wonderfully rendered) burly men that make up the elite Raptor Squad. As is the custom, each one’s got a snazzy code-name; yours is Nomad. You’re told it’s a covert assignment, not war (That doesn’t stop the kiddies from shooting at will now, does it?). Your job is to find and arrange for evac of a science team that’s trapped on an island the North Koreans have taken a particular liking to; the reasons unfold through the demo.

The game immediately puts you in a tropical paradise that can show off CryEngine 2’s prowess in all it’s blooming glory. You were waiting to hear this, weren’t you: Crysis looks AMAZING. From the rippling water to the draw distances FarCry proved were possible, every aspect of the visual presentation screams “impressive”. The human models are painstakingly detailed, down to the last ugly wart. How many games draw comments on how thick the skin looks? We love rhetorical questions.

Now that we’re done with the obvious, let’s move on to the gameplay. The suit-powers are the cornerstone of Crysis’ gameplay, and it’s “core differentiator” vis-a-vis other shooters. And considering how central it is to the overall experience, the suit controls MUST work to a ‘T’. Early gameplay videos showed off a radial menu, where you pick a suit-power by moving the mouse in the general direction of the power of your choice. This could have been a pain, but thankfully all control styles have been accommodated. You can use the keyboard and mouse in any combination you like, to select the suit powers. For example, you can bring up the power-selection menu by holding down ‘V’ or hitting the middle-mouse button. You can then select the power you wish to unleash on the hapless NPC’s, by either moving the mouse pointer to your favorite part of the dial, or by hitting the corresponding number-key shortcut.

You can also modify your weapons with “tactical attachments”, and more standard stuff like scopes and a flashlight. To do this, just bring up the weapon-mod menu (which is what we call it) by hitting ‘C’ and toggle the attachments by - again - using your mouse or the number keys. You can also access the weapon mods from the suit-power screen, by hitting ‘5′ when the menu is active. You can carry upto two weapons, other than your standard-issue pistol - yes you can dual-wield the pistols. You toggle between your reliable fists and the pistols by hitting ‘1′, while any of the other two weapons can be selected by hitting ‘2′. Grenades are also available, but they are not part of the same inventory pool. The numbers might seem limited, but it’s the demo, and the dash of variety brought in by the weapon mods is supposed to make up for it.

We say “supposed to” because at this point, the weapon-mod concept feels a bit tacked-on to us. Sure you can change the sights on your gun on the fly, which accommodates different kinds of players. But other than that, (and the ability to attach/remove the silencer) there’s nothing much in there which couldn’t have been done the standard way. Then again, it’s just a 45-minute slice from what we’re sure is going to be a satisfyingly long journey, and we would love to take back our words when we review the full game.

Minor gripes aside, the game is fun to play. The weapons feel right and shooting is a pleasure. You interact with the environment by hitting ‘F’ by default, which covers everything from using consoles to picking up barrels for use as cover or as eco-friendly weaponry. The size of the object you pick up determines if you still have a hand free. So in stealth mode you can always grab a can or a banana (Ooh yeah!) to use as a distraction, while keeping your gun handy - just in case your efforts to emulate good ol’ Soriddu Suneku fall flat on the beautiful grass.

You can also grab enemies by their throats! Now we haven’t used it long enough to determine if you can leverage the ample time you have on your hands (more on that later) to choke your enemies to death, but it’s far easier (and more satisfying!) to just fling them into the air, or right back at their buddies for some killing-machine-action economy class. For some real damage to be done though, you’d have to use the “Maximum Strength” suit power; which brings us back to the core gameplay mechanic of the game.

You have four suit powers available to you, and we don’t have too many reasons to believe there will be more in the final game. For one, the suit seems to be standard US army issue - hey, it’s the magic year 2020! Unless some of the alien technology you would no doubt discover later on in the full game miraculously ties in with your suit, do not expect to start flying around the islands. Secondly, the circular design of the power selection menu means that the number of slots is fixed. So unless you could swap suit-powers in and out, there doesn’t seem to be any room for customization.

But what there is, is good enough. By default, your suit would be set to “Maximum Armor” mode, where the damage from bullets and such is significantly reduced. The second power available to you is “Maximum Speed” where you can outrun your enemies and zip from cover to cover. “Maximum Strength” allows you to kill your enemies with a single punt of a barrel, or to jump high and take very little damage from fall. If you are the stealthy type, you would be frequently hitting ‘V’ + 4 to activate “Cloak”. The powers are all balanced out by the amount of suit energy they use. For example, “Cloak” consumes a unit of energy for approximately every second you stay hidden. If you move around though, the energy dwindles at a much faster rate in proportion to the number of steps you are taking and possibly, the speed. Overall, the energy budget for the suit powers seems pretty well thought out, and should keep you from abusing them overly.

The suit powers also have use beyond combat. For example, you would frequently have to use “Maximum Strength” to allow yourself to jump over barriers and scale cliffs. We are also told that “Maximum Speed” improves the reload speed, among other things. While we would love to see some interesting applications of the auxiliary effects of the use of suit powers in solving complex environmental puzzles, we are not expecting Crysis to shift focus from its combat - which is solid.

The enemies are fairly good at locating you in the middle of all that foliage, and bringing your health down into the reds once they do. Sure your suit powers may make them look like midgets sometimes, but we are more than certain the friendly aliens you will get to face later are the real test your suit is waiting for. We had mentioned at the beginning of this article that you are a part of a squad, but in the demo you (predictably) get split up from the rest of the group and play lone-wolf most of the time. While you eventually manage to meet up with them, that’s where the demo ends. So you would have to wait for the full game to find out how the friendly NPC combat AI works.

Speaking of combat, while you definitely cannot rush out screaming “RAMBO!!!” at a huddling of the Koreans and expect to survive to relate the (greatly exaggerated) tale to your grandkids, the game does seem to cut you some slack when it comes to the health and energy meters. They regenerate so fast you hardly realize you had taken any damage - provided you make it to cover soon enough. You can beat the game creeping forward, using a combination of the ‘Cloak’ suit-power and the ample cover (and therefore, time) available, and - in places - even entirely avoid combat. While it’s nice to be able to play the game any way you like, we would have preferred the choices to be a little harder to make than that. Hopefully the higher difficulty levels should fix this problem, and bring back fond memories of the times your behind got handed out to you by the AI in FarCry. You only get your first glimpse of the alien tripods (they’re EVERYWHERE!) at the very end of the demo, so the full game should be a lot tougher than what these 45 minutes hint at.

While FarCry was enjoyably tough, one of the reasons for the game being hard was actually an issue of sorts - no save-games. The developers seem to have been listening, for Crysis allows you to save a game at any point of time (except when a cineractive is on). While at first sight, Crysus may seem a little easier than FarCry, we feel that’s going to change when we get our hands on the final game, when we’ll have more appreciation for this addition to it’s already impressive list of features.

While on the topic of FarCry, if there was one thing that everyone (including the developers) found lacking, it was a believable story. Sure you had to stop a crazy scientist from destroying the world, but there are shinier covers to wrap that piece of chocolate in, than the one used in 2004. While we know that Crysis revolves around some kind of alien invasion, and the demo does not give away too much, we do know that the basic props for delivering the story are in place. The game takes control of the camera (and you) and chops up the display with two black bars at a story point. An enormous amount of attention has been placed on the human models, especially their faces (which, come to think of it, is the only part of their body you really get to see). While the grimacing and eye-rolls of the Koreans you are strangling is a sight to behold, the NPC’s are fairly expressive during the cineractive sequences. It’s not Half-Life 2, but it does seem better than the little-to-no NPC interaction you had (face-to-face) in BioShock. The voice acting is decent, though it is hard to judge since the dialogue so far have been limited to standard military smack-talk that you expect from a game with big burly men in tight muscular looking suits. The music, similarly, does its job quite well. We can only wait for the final game to see if the presentation mechanics get exploited to their fullest potential.

Crysis promised to be the one title PC fanboys could stick up the noses of their console counterparts. While it remains to be seen for how long it continues to be an exclusive, the demo lays to rest any doubts about the game being able to live up to its hype. Keep calling your nearest retailers to find out when it hits the shelves. Till then, just keep playing the demo!

Download links: Torrent, Gamer’s Hell (Direct Download)

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• captain-exile Says:
  October 30th, 2007 at 7:43 pm

  Nice preview D…Keep it up!