Crysis has been the most hyped and hotly anticipated first person shooter to appear on the PC of late, which is certainly a worthy accomplishment from the marketing team when you consider that both the Call of Duty series and Half-Life series had new releases in and around the same time, not to mention Bioshock's entry onto the PC scene. Crysis was billed as a game that would redefine nearly every aspect of the FPS genre, and whilst there is no denying that it's exceptionally good looking (even on the modest medium settings my poor PC could handle) and technically wonderful, it still felt like I was playing just another shooter. Not that this is a bad thing - I actually quite enjoyed playing Crysis - but it has suffered from the towering expectations people that had for it.

The story for Crysis centres on a conflict between America and North Korea (I assume it's the North - they're 'evil' don't you know) in the not-too-distant future of 2020. In an area known as the Linghan Islands, a group of US archaeologists discover what they first think is a statue (easy mistake), but in fact turns out to be an alien artefact. The Koreans move in to secure the area, taking all of the archaeologists hostage - needless to say, this doesn't sit too well with the Americans, who send in an elite special forces team to extract the hostages. Nomad, the character you take control of, and the rest of the team have little idea as to the scale of the events that will unfold however, finding themselves dwindling in number, in the middle of a quickly escalating war between the US and Korea, along with the presence of an unknown alien force. Sounds like the plot to a bad movie doesn't it? In essence that's what it is - it wouldn't be too farfetched to find Steven Seagal as one of your teammates. Nevertheless, Crysis isn't about the story - it's all about the gameplay!

Developers Crytek have embraced the idea that in the near future troops could be wearing some kind of 'super suit' that enhances them to a superior level than every other human. In Crysis, this is manifested in the nanosuit, which features a major role in the gameplay. There are four modes implemented in the nanosuit - speed, strength, armour and cloaking. Only one of these modes can be active at one time and each uses a certain amount of energy performing a function before recharging when inactive. The game encourages you to utilise the different modes in the suit to overcome the predicaments that you encounter during the game, hence the tagline of "Adapt, engage, survive." For example, you might need to engage the strength mode to leap onto a ledge that's unreachable in any other mode so that you can get in behind the enemy. Alternatively, you may need the speed mode if you get yourself into a situation that's too hot to for even our nanosuit-wearing Nomad to handle and must sprint away to recover your energy and health.

Of course, this idea is not set in concrete and you can take on tasks how you wish. Sneaking around taking out people one by one in the cloaking mode is obviously going to be preferred by the more stealthy gamer or you can sprint in with the speed mode, quickly switch to maximum armour and just run and gun like you were playing Unreal Tournament. However, because maximum armour makes you quite slow, it's more like plod and gun than run and gun. A lot of the time I went with the latter option, as I felt that the Koreans needed to know I was in a suit that made me superior to them.

This idea of gamer-defined gameplay continues when it comes to choosing how you are going to traverse the hugely scaled environments. The environments are beautiful to behold, crammed with sandy coastlines, dense jungle and lush hillsides, to name but a few. Sometimes a path to an objective is dictated, but a lot of the time it's up to you how you approach an area. For example, getting to one objective could have you either trekking through the jungle drawing as little attention to yourself as possible or, on the contrary, hopping into the nearest car, truck or boat and just getting there as quickly and noisily as possible. Being on the normal setting for my first outing, I chose the vehicular option, as you can control the gun whilst you're driving on this setting and taking out people who manage to notice the metal construct speeding towards them spraying hot lead is rather easy. This option does get taken away on the harder difficulties though, as you have to manually change seats to operate the gun - and by manually, I mean by pressing one of the "F" keys.

Speaking of guns, the other aspect of the gameplay I enjoyed is the customisation system available for nearly all weapons. Hitting C brings up the weapons menu and you can then attach things like scopes, silencers, flashlights and grenade launchers to enhance your weapon. The name of the game here is, again, all about adapting to the situation you're in. Having a silencer on when you don't need it hinders you quite a bit when people already know you're around, as the damage inflicted is considerably less with a silencer than without. On the other hand, making a nice headshot from a distance is rather redundant if you do it without a silencer and consequently every Korean in the area knows where you are. The same is true of having a high-powered scope when you're engaged in close combat; it hinders rather than helps, so you must consider how your arsenal is set up before engaging the enemy.

And a lot of the time, you are in close combat situations, Crysis feels as though it has a dislike, if not downright hatred, of fighting at long range. Unless you have the Precision Rifle (and a lot of the time you won't) where you can kill with one shot, any other assault rifle requires a rather silly amount of bullets to kill your foes, save getting a headshot and taking an enemy down at distance. This is just for one of your bog standard Korean soldiers by the way, and not any of the more advanced enemies you will come across later on in the game. Sadly, the same is not true of your character and even with your nanosuit set to maximum armour you can only seem to take a relatively small amount of hits before you have to retreat or find cover from the unnervingly accurate AI.

If I was to put a stamp on what brought this game down more than anything, it would have to be the AI. If I was being nice, I would say that it was quirky at times, but quite honestly there is little reason to be nice about it as at times it is quite scarily bad. The rather brilliant accuracy they enjoy aside, the AI can be anything from far too stupid to far too clever or even, bizarrely, both at the same time. It would be quite easy to write a rather long list of AI 'moments', but I shall just mention a few examples. On the stupid side of things, enemies run to replace the poor soul on the gun emplacement you just shot in the face, making it more like Point Blank than anything else. As well as this, they sometimes fail to notice a fallen comrade in their vicinity. I have mentioned the stunning accuracy the AI enjoys when they do spot you and, by the way, this seems to be enhanced further by those in vehicles coupled with knowing exactly where you are at all times once they have spotted you. Hiding behind a building stops them, but pop your head out even after some time and the bombardment begins again nigh on instantly. This leads to having to hope towards finding some kind of missile launcher nearby or, failing that, crawling inch by inch in the cloaked mode towards your objective. This can become overly time consuming and tedious, causing a fair amount of frustration.

The AI managing to be both far too clever and far too stupid at the same time only seems to happen in one situation but still astounds me. Say you are lying prone on the road in cloaked mode waiting for a patrol to pass so that you can gun them all down with their backs to you (sporting I know). All very well in theory, but the enemies will somehow manage to notice you. But they're not quite sure about it because you're cloaked, so they sidestep around you with their guns pointed directly at you - but don't actually do anything until you initiate the combat. This just seems so daft to me; either they've spotted you or they haven't.

Graphically, as I have touched upon in places, Crysis is sublime; you will be hard pushed to find a more aesthetically pleasing game out there (and this I may remind you is on my PC that is nowhere near achieving the highest specifications set by the game). The physics complement this nicely and it is rather pleasing to see trees been torn apart and falling over in the midst of a firefight. As far as the audio goes, it's very nice atmospherically and whilst not jumping out at you does enough to retain and enhance the mood when it needs to. In terms of the dialogue and general vocal sounds however, it seemed to be out of sync or delayed a lot of the time, like a dying groan from someone about five seconds after you've killed him for example. This could just be my setup mind, as I couldn't find anything about this mentioned elsewhere.

Despite having to go through Gamespy to play the multiplayer of Crysis (not a fan of gamespy myself), I found myself quite enjoying it. The modes are kept to a minimum in Crysis' multiplayer and consist of either Instant Action or Power Struggle. Instant action is pretty self-explanatory and is just what you need if you want to jump right in for some deathmatch style killing. Power struggle is much more complex, involving, or at least the premise of involving, depending on who you end up with, team play with objectives to complete and locations to capture. Having spent many months, probably nearing years, of my life on Call of Duty 1 and 2's search and destroy multiplayer modes, this was much more to my taste. The multiplayer is solid and enjoyable to play, but with the online multiplayer market being quite robust in other games, I can't imagine Crysis making too much of an impact.

It would be safe to say that Crysis, at least in the single player, does not manage to live up to the expectations that people had for it. Crytek's idea and shell for this game is superb, but falls a little short in the execution. You will still have a lot of fun with Crysis if you enjoy the FPS genre, and as I said at the beginning of this review, I very much enjoyed playing Crysis. It's certainly not the genre redefining game that it claimed to be, but you will still experience many intense moments to keep you happily progressing through, despite the sometimes dodgy AI.

Reviewed by Tom Selwyn for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).