CRYSIS 

Crytek's Far Cry came pretty much out of nowhere back in 2004 and impressed just about everyone, press and players alike, with its ground breaking graphics and truly open gameplay. Only the heavyweight Half-life 2 prevented it from sweeping the board of that year's prizes. 

Four years later out comes its successor, Crysis. Rather more anticipated than Far Cry, it was awaited anxiously by all, with its quite extraordinary visuals being trailed constantly. 

THE GAME 

You play a member of a small Special Forces unit dropped onto a Pacific island to investigate the disappearance of a scientific expedition. The reason you are going, rather than a simple search and rescue outfit, is that the North Koreans are interested enough in what's going on to have invaded the island.

Your mission is to find and rescue the scientists. Your tasks in pursuit of this are given to you by your team leader or over the link to JCOM, back in the Carrier. Each of these will involve possible conflict with the Koreans and, just as in Far Cry, how "kinetic" you get is pretty much up to you. Being a one-man battalion, you can kick up a decent rumpus should you wish, but sometimes the odds are just a bit too stiff so you have the stealth option too. This is where the game really distinguishes itself from almost all the competition. While there are some geographical restrictions on where you can go, otherwise you are free to approach every objective from whatever direction you wish.

There is always the direct route, usually along a road, but you will be the centre of attention pretty quickly. Flanking is encouraged, though the Koreans aren't totally dim and have put up fences and walls which you will have to work out a way to overcome. Once you are inside a compound you can choose to sneak your way to your objective, or find a vantage point from which to pick off the enemy you spotted during your reconnaissance. Another option is to create some mayhem on one side of the camp, select stealth and bimble across to the quiet bit to carry out whatever task you were given. Bear in mind always that although you may be invisible, you remain audible, which can be enough for the enemy to bring lethal fire to bear.

 Other games give you some semblance of this freedom, but I doubt any gets within an order of magnitude of the options Crysis offers. This means great replay value (I'm on my third go round) and also means greater involvement from the player. If you are just running down defined lanes, gunning whatever comes your way, you use only a small part of your brain. Where you have to think about what you are going to do and then adjust the plan on the fly when it all goes for a ball of chalk, you invest a lot more of yourself in the play.

Mid-way through the game there is a distinct change of gear. At the risk of giving the story away, you find yourself in a very alien environment, battling creatures definitely not of this earth. Emerging from their base, you discover that your tropical island is now an icy nightmare and your enemies aren't just the Koreans anymore. The final showdown on the Carrier is widely accepted as being the weakest sequence, with the wonderful open environments of the first and third acts being replaced by some more traditional corridor shooting. 

So, how is this different from Far Cry and all the rest of the FPS out there? Well, aside from the sheer technical exuberance of the graphics and enemy AI, there's the nanosuit. Which is quite special. 

SMALL THINGS 

The nanosuit is the thing that gives you the edge. It has four modes, two of which you will be using roughly 90% of the time. Firstly there is maximum shield. In this mode your suit absorbs the impact of bullets and bombs, using energy from your rechargeable source. You can therefore take a fair bit of punishment before losing health and provided you can find cover, you can quite quickly repair both yourself and the suit. 

Next is stealth mode. This renders you completely invisible to both humans and aliens. At rest, the mode uses relatively little energy, so you can sit and watch the enemy for ages, working out his routines and identifying the best way in and out of the next objective. However, should you move, the energy drains very quickly, so once again you have to find cover and recharge without being seen. It only takes about five seconds to reach full power, but if the bad guys are on your arse, even that's too long, so you have to pick your path with care. The second restriction is that should you fire a weapon while cloaked, you instantly drain your power supply and become visible (as well as vulnerable) to all and sundry. 

Mode three is all about speed. With this selected your normal walking pace is roughly doubled and you are able to sprint for about 100 yards at a fiendish pace. This is great for dashing across open spaces or away from a fire fight and you can use it to get to objectives more quickly, except that you may well stumble across a Korean patrol without warning. 

The final and least used mode is strength. Mostly you use this to jump higher than you would normally be able, both up and down. However, you can also use it more imaginatively. You can pick up almost anything that should be moveable and with strength selected, you can then throw it considerable distances or with great force. Thus you can use barrels and boxes as weapons. In fact, if you grab a Korean with your hands (an option that becomes available once you get close enough), you can either throw him around a quarter of a mile or use him as a weapon! Strength also allows you to punch holes in walls, shift boats and trucks and punch out any baddies that get in your way. 

If you use the suit intelligently and only initiate contact once you have the advantage, you can go long periods without dying. You can also try the full stealth option and attempt to achieve all your tasks with the minimum of force, though this would deny you the use of some great weapons and mean that you wouldn't get to marvel at the enemy's AI. 

HARDWARE 

Firstly the stuff you get to use in the game. As in Far Cry you are limited in what you can carry. At the low end is the pistol. Then your standard automatic rifle, which you can replace with the Korean KY71 (aka Kalashnikov) and a highly effective shotgun. At various points you get access to a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher, though you have to lose a long weapon in order to carry the former. You will need the latter to take out both tanks and attack helicopters, which appear to be totally immune to machine guns! Towards the latter part of the first half of the game, you will be given a railgun type rifle and even a mini-gun, which is actually rather more of a hindrance than a help I found. There are three types of grenade as well. As you progress you will gain access to weapon modifications, such as torches, laser sights, grenade launcher, silencer and a variety of scopes. These you can fit or remove as you see fit. The silencer is usually left on the pistol as while it reduces the hitting power, it means you can carry out kills without alerting the rest of the enemy. 

The Far Cry binoculars make a welcome return. As well as having a directional and extremely sensitive microphone, they have a link to your HUD, meaning that you can lock onto and subsequently track enemy soldiers and vehicles. This is vital before you head into an enemy base, particularly if they have fixed defences. 

Road vehicles come in four guises. Most common is the humvee, with a gun midships. Also quite numerous are plain civilian trucks, while you can also trundle around in heavy lorries, some of which come armed. Driving is not quite the pleasure it was in Far Cry and aside from a few instances, you will probably prefer to stay on foot where you can use the suit to its best advantage. Finally there is a wonderful sequence where you get to take part in a tank battle. Driving the thing is great fun and there is immense satisfaction in pulling off a moving shot which blows the turret off an enemy. 

As in Far Cry, boats are both common and necessary. The enemy uses them to patrol near the coast and on rivers and you can use them to either flank or enfilade prior to hitting the beach. 

There's no hang glider this time, but you do get to fly both a helicopter and a VTOL, though it has to be said that the latter sequence is rather weak, with the thing handling like both a brick and a feather, which ain't easy to achieve. 

Now we come to the area where the game received the most flak. Computer hardware. The system demands of the engine are phenomenal. Unless you have the fastest available dual core chip, with 4GB RAM and top of the range graphics card, you will be stooging around on low or medium graphics at best. What's more, the game is optimised for DirectX 10, which comes with Vista only, so if, like most gamers, you're still kicking around with XP, you won't even begin to see the game at its best. I have an old P4 chip, running at 3GHz, with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 6800GT 512 MB card and auto-detect sets me to low graphics in all departments and only 800x600 resolution! I've tried running with some settings at medium, particularly pop-up distance, but the frame rate drops to where it's almost impossible to aim your weapons. 

Having said all that, even on low settings, it looks better than just about anything else out there at time of writing (mid-08). There is a sequel / second episode upcoming and Crytek swear blind that they've improved the engine to the extent that almost everyone will be able to set at least medium settings without it turning into a slide show. 

AND SO … 

Crysis is Far Cry on speed. The freedom is there, only more so and the enemy AI is mostly spot-on. The tasks are varied enough to keep you interested in the plot and the kit, especially the nanosuit, make for excellent gameplay. Graphics I've already mentioned. However, it is a game of two halves. In the first, you see the best of Crytek's design, while the second smacks either of brave experimentation or a sudden loss of nerve. When it comes down to it, the nanosuit is the trump card in this game and the sequences when you have to use it imaginatively are the most satisfying. 

A mention too of the "emergent" gameplay. For the unitiated, this means stuff happening that isn't scripted, but which comes about via the unplanned convergence of various gameplay elements. An example would be an instance at the top of a hill where I was supposed to destroy something or other. I had successfully neutralised the perimeter guards, attracting the attention of about half a dozen soldiers who came down the hill in such a way that I didn't have a hope of engaging them all. I therefore cloaked up and snuck round them. Finding myself in their camp on the summit, I saw an explodable barrel, which gave me an idea. I picked it up and using strength, I hurled it down towards the patrol. These barrels burn for a short time before exploding, so my intention was to shoot it as it fell, effectively turning it into a huge grenade. As it happened I completely missed it, but no matter. Firstly it landed directly on top of one of the enemy before rolling towards the rest of them. I switched to sniper scope and put a couple of rounds in it, so that by the time it arrived it was ready to cook, which took down the rest of the patrol.  

Using the suit's abilities imaginatively is also great fun. A fast dash towards a perimeter fence, followed by a power jump onto a roof inside the compound, cloaking in mid-air. The enemy know something has happened and some may even have seen me come over the wall, but by lying low and recharging, I now have the advantage and can create mayhem at my leisure. 

So, the first half of the game is probably the best FPS ever made. The second half has its moments, but playing through again I would skip the alien bit and the Carrier denouement. As for the hardware requirements, I really can't get excited. Even at low res', it beats the crap out of anything contemporary and if your rig is so decrepit it can't run it at all, then you know what you have to do!