Be Excellent To Each Other

It's download only. It was released after the second had been out on the consoles for ages. I've never played the PC version.

...but I'll tell you this much, it's awesome.

The second seemed to be terribly linear to me despite the talk of multiple routes. It did have those multiple routes as promised but they were horribly signposted throughout. Go here! No, here! Or here! Handholding drives me up the bloody wall in a genre when all you need to do to any gamer over the age of 8 is cram a controller in their hands, kick them up the arse and tell them to go shoot shit. Seriously, there are multiple routes wouldn't it be more fun to let us find them? If one tactic ain't working you don't need a neon hexagon spaffing over your HUD like a Japanese girl with glasses to tell you to try something else. It's like designers are too scared to let us experiment.

Where was I? Oh Crysis. Well forget all that shit cause it's gone. They give you a green blob on a map and tell you to get over there, sometimes you'll have a yellow blob and told you can go over there if you like. That's your lot.

I've been acting like Predator (the good one. In the jungle) fucking people up left right and centre. Where am I? IM BEHIND YOU IN THE BUSHES PICKING YOU UP BY THE NECK PUNY KOREAN. It's awesome. Sometimes I'll just jump in a boat and cruise up the river unloading the .50 cal like Rambo. Maybe I'll snag a jeep and bust along the coast. Maybe I'll whack full armour on and take 20 of the fuckers on to the death like Terminator.

It's a FPS that finally lets you do what you want. The suit is given time to breathe and the various abilities are a joy to play about with. Especially stealth as you creep in and cause a ruck, disappear and appear elsewhere with a crafty peek-a-boo and unload whatever armoury you like the sound of.

The weapon set is awesome with some of the best hand cannon sounds since, er, Crysis 2. Dual pistols are deafening. Assault rifle fire off a lovely BLAT BLAT BLAT as you storm a beach, crawl along a river bed, swim in the sea, bust into a school house, etc etc. The options so blatantly displayed in Crysis 2 gone you're left alone to figure out how you want to cause wanton destruction.

Bloody ace.





(Yes, I've never played Far Cry)

Yeah it's great. And it's better than Far Cry* so don't worry about that. Crysis 2 was shite - still on my shelf barely played.

I haven't played the console remake, mind, I played it on PC when it came out innit.

*Far Cry had an excellent demo, I recall. It was pretty and it let you wander quite far around the island. The actual game didn't add much, barring an utterly horrendous final third involving, well, I won't spoil it in case you ever actually do want to play it.

I quite enjoyed Crysis 2 (the multiplayer was aces) but it seems like a step backwards after playing this. Everything I liked about Crysis is here but with added wandering about and doing what you want. I've a feeling it's still not Grand Theft Crysis as it still seems to have "levels" but those levels are wide open pieces of the island to piss around in.

I don't know how the console port stacks up with the aging PC version but it's as lovely as Crysis 2 was/is and that was bloody lovely.

Crysis 2 >>>>Crysis.

I'm sure it's identical barring the super-duper graphics it can manage on a high-end PC.

BTW: I was being a little dramatic referring to Crysis 2 as "shite". To be fair, I didn't play it very far at all before I got bored and moved onto something else (as usual). And you've just reminded me that the multiplayer was actually fairly good - a bit too much like CoD to justify its own existence, but certainly one of the better FPS multiplayer efforts of recent years.

I enjoyed Crysis for the first few levels but then I got bored of it.

Make of that what you will.

I've attempted a D-Day beach invasion completely missing the signs for the mine field. No amount of stealth reattached those limbs.

Crawling around a water gully into a Korean compound worked wonders, mind, as I picked off the runts of the litter and slung their corpses back in the gully.

Y'know when you're enjoying a game when you needn't do something but you do it anyway as it feels right.

I'm sure I'll tire of messing about soon enough and want to advance the story though, but at least it's letting me arse about for the time being.

This really is like comparing Predator with Predator 2.

All Far Cry's demo did was show what a pack of lies we were fed regarding the "amazing" AI and "fight or stealth" gameplay. There was no way of attracting attention or distracting guards as smashing your knife on a rock (despite producing a loud clang) didn't cause them to investigate. When the time came to fight I easily defeated them all by getting to a vantage point and picking them off as they charged one at a time across open ground straight towards me.

The Xbox version (Instincts) was far better as it dispensed with these pretensions and made the game an exciting blastfest. That you gained mutant powers to lunge and scram people to death like a vodka-fueled chavette only added to the fun.

Monsters, though, are always added to these games and are always shit. From the original's mutant stealth baboons to Instinct's ghoul suicide bombers and Crysis' tentacle monsters, it's a parade of shit.

I think I'll replay this. I think the first time I played it I had just bought a new PC and was mostly looking at the graphics, like a stupid hi-fi spod listening to his speakers.

Looks like you haven't gotten up to

!

Jai finished, madam.

It was good.

Ok, so that's not the most enthusiastic conclusion but let's not get ahead of ourselves because it is 'just' a FPS after all. But a very good one but merely a good game. It's probably too late since it's release to harp on about how good the suit is because most of the people reading this will probably have played both Crysis' but it's fairly revolutionary how it gives you what must have sounded like it might break the game when it was propositioned. You can go invisible. INVISIBLE.

Being invisible will always be aces. I'm invisible right now. Behind you.

This has a much better structure than Crysis 2 as well. It starts off letting you wander across the wide open levels nicely; taking out Korean's and pissing around with the suit and feeling suitably awesome. Then it builds on that with more Korean's and a bit of base storming. Then it takes a turn for the worse in the second half with a pissing irritating helecopter that won't leave you alone but it more than makes up for it with multiple objectives and a fair few that you don't even need to do if you can't be arsed. I was quite into it so I could be arsed and got rewarded by an easier ride through to the main objective. Plus there are some fooking mahooosive levels and one or two where the objective is simply to leg it across country without being seen or running for your fucking life. It's awesome. You can get in any number of trucks, jeeps and boats an' all. Why wasn't there anything like this in the sequel? For shame.

Then it puts you in a tank.

We all know tanks are the most boring assault vehicle in the universe especially when fighting off other tanks. Fire shell, wait, fire shell, wait, get hit, fire shell, 'splodes and trundle on and repeat. But it's over quickly so it's forgivable.

By the time I got to the cave I was getting FPS fatigue so I was quite happy when the story kicked in. Yeah, it's a change of pace and a bit silly floating around in zero gravity but it doesn't outstay its welcome so it ain't that bad. Everything that follows was enough to hold my attention as the game rushed to its conclusion. The last quarter isn't terrible and, to be fair, I was happy to see how it played out. There's no stealth from thereon in just endless blasting until the bosses - which are terrible: Shoot four cannons, shoot three spacemen, shoot two cannons, use tactical nuke, watch ending.

So what have I learned? Crysis looks fucking lovely and that Cry Engine 3 thang that they've got going on for the consoles makes everything uber pretty. The ace bits like the massive mountain that starts to crumble as you get closer was ace. The frozen wasteland looked beaut. The sphere that enveloped the island: groovy. The island: also groovy.

It's a solid shooter and the setting made for a nice blast away from the corridor shooters that we simply play time and time again. I can't remember many shooters that give this level of freedom to wander about and make your own mischief. The suit comes to life and the vehicles are the icing on the cake. It must have taken a good 7 hours to playthrough which is about right, I'd say.

The story is a load of old shit again though. And what an ending? Bleeding stupid, that's what it was. The developers need a bloody good script to go with their awesome tech.

I'd give it a solid 6/10. Well worth a download for £15. If you enjoyed Crysis 2 then you'll think the sun shines out the arsehole of this un'.

The tank level can be much improved by getting out the tank.

The levels after the tank can be improved by uninstalling the game.

It's not so bad. I'd have probably been bored with the same shit for another hour. I'd agree that there was no need for the aliens though. They could have easily pitted you against nanosuit soliders some more and be done with the science fiction bollocks.