Crysis Impressions.

[BLSmith2112 0]

Update: A minute or so of me playing the game:

<span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>Video:</span>

Stream it, or download it from link on bottom.

I finally got my mits on one of my most anticipated titles of 2008. And lemme say, its quite cool. But aggravating at first.

<span style='font-size:23pt;line-height:100%'>MP Demo:</span>

Well after playing the MP demo for about 2 hours I've got a good idea of what to expect in the final game. In the beginning, before you play, you can watch a nice little tutorial video on how to play. Once you launch your first game, a voice will come up and talk to you. However, the battle that is ensuing from the MP game that's going on, makes it hard to hear anything. I suggest going into a smaller server to start.

The gametype: Power Struggle.

Basically what this game type is, is each team has a base. In this map, one base was a US submarine, and the other was a North Korean Base. Each team must take certain points, these points are:

1. War Factories (Produce Tanks, Armored Cars, Etc).

2. Spawn Points

3. Experimental Weapon Stations

Taking these points allows you to have more equipment. Like tanks and such. You acquire these items by purchasing them. You get money every time you capture a flag, or kill an enemy. Eventually you can save up enough to purchase a nuke. You can use the weapons at your disposal to try and wipe out the enemy's base. The base is prebuilt with very extensive defensive turrets guarding it. Hitting it with tanks, satchel charges, or a nuke will damage/destroy them. Once their base is destroyed, you win.

The graphics are the nicest I've ever seen. But, I'm not a graphics/eye candy kinda guy so I saw right through that. Although, its hard to.. because everything (especially underwater) is so darn pretty. Also, you'll love the suttle music playing in the backround as your playing. It's not distracting, but really enhances the gameplay.

Framerate was smooth about 90% of the time, with some major netcode lag spikes here and there. That can get rather annoying when your in a firefight and everything stops moving for 1 second. I asked the other players if they have experienced these spikes, and they agreed. 90% of the game with 40-60FPS dropping to 0 for 1 second.

Also the hitpoint system is.. well, I'm not a fan of it. You can hit your opponent right in the tooth and it wont kill him. Unless you have a single shot high powered rifle that can have a mounted scope on it to make a sniper rifle. Other than that, it takes some getting used to. The scope on the sniper rifle is not static ether. The player actually breaths, and you have to carefully aim at your target to actually hit him. The vehicle windows seem like bullet proof. I had someone hit the turbo button in their vehicle and I had a lot of rounds going right into the driver seat of that car and nothing happened... except me getting ran over. The tires on vehicles can be shot/popped. It however, only slightly effects someones driving if you knock only 1 tire off. Ejecting out of a moving vehicle is something I found quite useful even if I did not get the credit for the kill. The vehicle keeps its current velocity and slows down as a real car would, once you jump out.

The cloaking system on the nanosuit hardly gives you an edge. You can see the purple-static electricity outlining the player if your close enough. Also, don't think about sniping while in a bush cloaked. The scope vision is blurred because of the electricity.

Vehicles were at first very exciting. The boats are very fun to drive, but the second lag burst you get now and again ruins the feeling. The trucks, well they jerk. If you tell them to turn left or right, it doesn't smoothly turn the vehicle. Its like once you command it to go from 12 o' clock to 2 o' clock, it skips 12:30-1:00-1:30 and goes right to 2. But once you get used to it its okay. The MP demo level had no destructible environments ether. I found myself driving into a wooden fence and I came to a complete stop. This includes tree's as well. However, I heard that these environments will be fully destructible in DX10 online game types when they are available. I'm not sure about DX9, because of the processing power required to have fully destructible environments with 32 people running around wreaking havok.

The hovercrafts are fun, driving over the water then onto the roads. However once you get out of a vehicle, a few seconds later... watch out for the alarm that goes off, faster and faster.. once it reaches a single pitch, boom, there it goes to respawn. The explosions are breath taking. Especially the nukes. When a nuke went off, I found myself dead because a huge piece of debree flew about 700meters into the air and landed right on me.

There are air factories, but not in this demo. The feeling I got wasn't so much "battlefield 2", but it derived from that. The leaning ability and indoor combat fights were really neat. But the motion blur at first gave me a throbbing headache, and I had to stop playing after my first 30 minutes as it actually hurt. But once I jumped back on, I knew what to expect and got used to it.

Some of the reflections are bugged, displaying rainbow like colors instead of white sunlight. And the sounds are sometimes similar to arma. You are getting shot, and you don't realize it. You hear nothing at times. I never heard the origin of the shot, nore did I hear the bullets hitting me. However, there is a little red blip that appears around your crosshairs to tell you that not only your being fired at/hit, but its direction. But to me, I could care less about that as I couldn't hear anything, or see where the shots were coming from. I am however, happy to report that the game isn't nearly as chaotic as I thought it was going to be (I'm not a fan of Counter Strike, battlefield, UT2004 chaos shooters, but I could get used to this). The levels are nice and large. Walking from one part of the map to the other takes about 4-5 minutes, but again this was not an Air factory level and I assume theres much bigger levels to come. You can use your "speed" power from the nanosuit, but it drains your power bar extremely fast and you are then forced to just "sprint" the rest of the way. There's three speeds: Walk, Run, Nanosuit speed. Running uses no energy, but your gun is not usable. Only when walking.

The game menu's are nice. There's no game-render back there, so loading times between menus are quick and painless. If you played World in Conflict, the menu interface is similar. Once you do load a level, the round begins with 30 seconds of free for all, allowing all of those with slower computers to catch up. Once the 30 seconds have past, the round restarts and the game begins.

All in all, its a fun MP experience. But unrealistic. It's one of those games, if you've got 20 minutes before work and need a few frags. This game will do it. As this was DX9 only, I'm shocked that this isn't DX10 and cannot wait to see it.

But if your like me, and prefer realism, and like the fact that when you shoot someone in the face they fall on it. Then perhaps this isn't for you. However, the single player version of Crysis is something, even hard core arma players wouldn't mind playing. As there are 4 difficulty settings: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Delta. Delta takes pretty much all the crosshairs off, and the enemy indicators off, making it as realistic as possible given you still have a nanosuit. All in all, a "fun" game. Not so much 'serious'. If you take it slow and cautiously instead of running around, it pays off. The top players (I was 4/32), were very stealthy in their approaches. I however, had a 1:2 Kill/Death ratio and sucked horribly.

System Specs:

Video: 8800GTX 768MB

OS: Vista 32bit

RAM: 4GB

CPU: Quad 6600

Settings: Everything on High. 8x AA 1280x1024.

Settings can be turned onto "Very High" in full version of the game. The demo: These options were disabled. My guess is "Very high" is for DX10 only.

My MP Demo rating: <span style='color:#33FF33'>9.3/10.</span>

Graphics: 10/10

Gameplay: 8.9/10

Sound: 8/10

Music: 10/10

Value: 9.5

[abs 2]

Thanks a lot for the very thorough review. You've got me pretty excited for this game. Now the only thing you're missing are some screenshots.

Abs

[Average Joe 0]

^^ Yup! Nice review Victor appreciated, I got a x1950xtx and hope it'll play crysis we'll enough!

[nephilim 0]

hmmm i though this demo was internal only...

gonna check with the boss...

[abs 2]

hmmm i though this demo was internal only...

gonna check with the boss...

You must have missed the memo.

Abs

[-DirTyDeeDs--Ziggy- 0]

Victor is a video game whore!

but I like whores!

thanks for the informative review, Victor.

from the sounds of it, it's better than ET-QW

[sickboy 13]

Nice review...

Crysis for me is mainly interesting in SP. Cant wait to get my hands on the DX10 version. Especially since there are quite some differences between DX9 <-> DX10 aswell as SP <-> MP ...

[Mr_Tea 0]

The DX9 Version looks very good too.

They presented Crysis in DX9 on the GC this year, and it looks for better than i expected from the DX9 Version.

[Dwarden 1125]

i read on other forum that in config is switch where You can enable physics

not sure if it was clientside or MP but they said it works in MP too (not sure if it must be server side enabled also)

[DBO_ 0]

Quote[/b] ]The MP demo level had no destructible environments ether. I found myself driving into a wooden fence and I came to a complete stop. This includes tree's as well. However, I heard that these environments will be fully destructible in DX10 online game types when they are available. I'm not sure about DX9, because of the processing power required to have fully destructible environments with 32 people running around wreaking havok.

it aint gonna happen on the scale everyones expecting. not in this decade anyway .

Quote[/b] ]hmmm i though this demo was internal only...

gonna check with the boss...

your boss says ,pls do not make yourself look unproffesional in www. forums , its bad for the image there trying to portray

[BLSmith2112 0]

I'll post some screenshots today.

[Dwarden 1125]

Quote ]As for the DX9 version we won’t have physics and day and night cycle in-game. That means you won’t be able to shoot down trees and/or alter any other objects than vehicles on the map. Additionally the time of day setting doesn’t change dynamically. This is caused due to the tremendous server load such physics might cause on crowded gaming servers

[/b]

LoL, so let me sum this up

Day/Night cycle in MP

OFP since 2001 @ DX8

JO since 2004 @ DX8/9

ArmA since 2006 @ DX9

IL2 since who knows when as its old like hell DX8 and OpenGL

Trees, bushes, walls and fences destruction in MP

OFP 2001 , partly some

JO 2004 , partly some

ArmA 2006, all objects defined with this prop

Building destructions in MP

ok i understood this brings to knees rendering still partial solutions possible like

Soeldner 2004/5

ArmA 2006

oh well i guess MS paid huge bucks to EA / Crytek for this

[BLSmith2112 0]

You can change the time dynamically. You can have it be set on a 24-hour realistic clock, or change it to whatever specifications you desire.

Next up, some pictures from my review.

Menu

Random Camera Starting Position Prior to Playing. (Free Camera)

Buy menu. On top of the submarine, sorry for the wall shot.

Underwater, fishes!

Sunrays are quite a nice sight.

[BLSmith2112 0]

Some more pictures:

Tactical Map: Choose Spawn points and see currently controlled sectors.

A perfect shot like this at someone driving a vehicle with the door off, still the perfect head shot will not kill him.

Someone rock-climbing in spectator mode.

Looking for that pesky sniper.

Froggy.

Perhaps, watching these videos on the Sandbox2 Editor will inform you, on what you can and cannot change dynamically:

Part1:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/17757.html

Part2:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/17762.html

I also can throw together a few seconds of video.

[sanctuary 19]

Is there some AI available in those different gametypes ?

After reading some reviews, certainly i am not be the most knowledgable user regarding the different directx version, but i am not sure to understand why is there a lack of a decent physic engine for the dx9 users while the dx10 ones will have it in that crysis game ?

(was just a rethorical question, i believe we all imagine the answer regarding some contracts )

[BLSmith2112 0]

Is there some AI available in those different gametypes ?

Not in the demo. As for the official game, I doubt it. However, modifications that have been hard at work for yearly a year already with this game have stated that they will have smart, intelligent AI similar to SP on their MP co-op game types. The editor allows for AI to be incorporated into missions fairly easily.

You can also (with the free editor included in retail game), create SP missions/campaigns with ease. Create movies by giving units waypoints and unit actions... etc.

[DBO_ 0]

Quote[/b] ]You can also (with the free editor included in retail game), create SP missions/campaigns with ease. Create movies by giving units waypoints and unit actions... etc.

a little like this you mean ?

[BLSmith2112 0]

I've also made many ArmA/OFP movies

Check sig for prooferino.

[red oct 2]

tried to apply for beta, but i don't meet system requirments acording to the aplication site

[froggyluv 2136]

I'm not much into 'gamey' shooters but i have to admit this sounds like a keeper. I remember some great moments from Far Cry, mostly just me running for my life but it was good fun. Glad they have a realistic 'delta' mode or I'd say pass.

thanks for report Victor!

[BLSmith2112 0]

Yea, I am very looking forward to delta mode.

[BLSmith2112 0]

Well after two days of playing it I'm not really bored yet. Kinda a first for me and these type of games. Still get mad when I die from out of nowhere because I hear nothing

[martinovic 0]

Bullets travel faster than sound so that's realistic. :P

[BLSmith2112 0]

I guess... but its really quite annoying. I mean I don't hear anything, even if they miss and the sound finally catches up to them.

[HogRoot 0]

Downloading my copy of the demo now....can't wait!! It all looks very impressive.