Crysis

Crysis certainly was bit of a change from the lengthy RPGs I have been playing lately – little story and much action. Or at least as much action as you can fit in 10+ hours.

I spent awhile deciding on which difficulty I should play. Eventually I ended up on Hard. The reason for not playing on Delta was mostly having a crosshair. Otherwise it would have probably been pretty much the same thing. I do not really see enemies speaking Korean making things any more difficult.

Being able to change he shape of the crosshair from the default circle one was also a bonus. I find circle-shaped crosshairs to be very hard to aim accurately with. Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Invisible War, for instance, use circle crosshairs.

I wish there had been some sort of progress system – RPG elements, if you will – for the nanosuit. Crysis 2 has, I believe. Regardless, I found the concept to be very clever though slightly a hassle to use. Direct hotkeys for the suit modes would have made it smoother.

And maybe the strength mode should turn on automatically when you grab someone. Enemies seemed to survive a single grab-throw without it. I also think the grabbing should be easier. Catching people was quite tricky at times and I often ended up just shooting them instead.

The gunplay was well enough. I would have liked to carry one more gun, though. Having a Precision Rifle in addition to an assault rifle and a shotgun would have been perfect. The FY71 worked all right as a sniper rifle too, however. Funny how the Korean soldiers had some serious trouble spotting me when I took silenced AR shots while prone in foliage. Their vision seemed to improve tremendously when I was in a vehicle or at a machine gun, however. And once I had been seen, they were pretty good at searching the area. Way better than in, let us say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Traversing the large maps was quite fun. Maybe somewhat slow as I found vehicles to be death traps, excluding maybe the tank. They were hard to drive and just made me an easy target. Thus I just went on foot. And while pushing foliage around in the jungles was cool, I think I prefer an urban setting for firefights.

The last level had some serious bugs. First I found a spot where I could fall through the map. And then when came the time to "nuke the bastard", the TAC gun did not lock on it. A known bug evidently but the majority of forum replies I found were just unhelpful advices what you are supposed to do and not how to get past the glitch. Someone suggested that it is caused by manually saving at any point, and as I had done so, I restarted the whole thing.

I ended up turning the difficulty down to Easy because something was always going wrong and getting to the last bit again was starting to become really frustrating. The small aliens were surprising me with melee, the bigger ones were exploding too close, and the ship's frost ray was freezing me in place, all the while Helena and Psycho kept yelling me to hurry: "C'mon, Nomad!" "Nomad, you need to shoot it!" "Nomad, what are you doing?" "Nomad!"

On Easy I got to the end without trouble and the TAC gun decided to work finally. For my efforts I was rewarded with a "see you in the next game" ending. Crysis was a pretty enjoyable experience, though. Even if I am not really into first person shooters.

Also, I was kind of surprised I recognized Claudia Black as Helena. She really did not sound like her at all until during the buildup before the final showdown. And in the fight she again lost Black's typical, sort of nasal-y voice.