Crysis

"Why doesn't mine look like that?!"

Source // MobyGames

Even as a console gamer, it was hard not to know what "But can it run Crysis meant" in the latter half of the noughties. An absusrd graphical spectacle ahead of its time, catering to such a small sliver of the PC gaming population that you had to wonder just what the point of releasing a game nobody could play in all it's glory was.

When it came time to build this rig in 2015, I knew Crysis was on the 1001 list, but absoltely didn't bother to find out if my chosen parts were capable of playing it. Even eight years after its release, it's a demanding game, and here I am, finally getting around to playing it another five years after that.

Let's get the question out of the way then. Can this PC run Crysis?

Fun Times

Yes. Mostly. After some fixes.

It's always fun to have to install software for connecting to dead multiplayer servers and anti-cheat measures when you just want to run around in a lust paradise jungle, crushing your enemies with your enhanced nanosuit. It's even more entertaining when the game then doesn't start until you install some 64-bit doohickies, and rename a few folders, but that's the life of a PC game sometimes.

The intro video is so alarmingly full of screen tearing that I suspect my time with Crysis might not be the best, but the auto-detect settings stuck everything on 'High'. Not 'Very High', but this wasn't a top of line rig even in 2015, so I'm good with 'High'.

Thankfully, the game itself plays much, much better than the intro video that attempted to show off all the cool things Crysis can do. You are Nomad, a soldier in a skintight nanosuit capable of giving you enhanced speed and strength. We're about parachute into an island paradise - clearly a familiar setting for the developers behind Far Cry - that is swarming with thr North Korean military. And something far worse...

We're here to rescue someone, a week after they sent word of there being something on this island that will change the world, whatever that could mean. Be sure to put your masks on before going outside.

Knocked out of the sky by an unknown object, the leader of this group of supersoldiers, Prophet, tells us not to worry that both our main and reserve chutes are out - the suit and a splashdown won't kill us. And it doesn't. It temporarily knocks our suit offline and scatteres us from the planned Landing Zone, but that's just a way to get familiar with the nanosuit. Look, it has a map!

The route to our objective is dark and challenges us to crawl under obstacles, melee destructible things, and gives us a safe place to pick up barrels and chuck them around as though they weighed nothing at all. This is basically your 'learn everything here' part of the game, which would have gone a lot smoother if the hints were aware that I was using the keyboard and mouse, and not an Xbox controller.

You've got quite a few things you can do from the beginning, but Crysis wants to give you a bit of a spectacle, so menus for changing your weapon attachments appear to float over your weapon in realtime, allowing you to admire your decisions. If you could see them in the first place. Night vision is also available, though.

We aren't alone on this island, and binoculars that sort of tag enemy threats come in handy to show us a couple of North Korean soldiers up ahead. Like Far Cry before it, you've got whatever tools you can think of to get past a problem.

Guns are a good choice, obviously, but you've got the space to flank around them, a nanosuit with a cloaking mode that renders you invisible for a short while, the superstrength to punch them into the cliffs...

I went with guns, mostly because my suit tricks were selected by a click and hold of the mouse wheel, which was annoying.

Frustrations

I am not the greatest PC FPS gamer, but I'm not a complete idiot with WASD controls either. I'm playing on Normal difficulty, in a black nanosuit, with a silenced weapon, hiding in some small bushes in the dark of the early morning. How am I seen and succesfully shot at by grunts?

Sure, the last guy might have worked out roughly where I was, and I probably do stick out like a bit of a sore thumb, but he wasn't bothering with supression. He had a bead on the very center of my face and pulled the trigger. He was ruthless.

He was dead, too, and your health will regenerate over time, so I was easily able to run along the beach and meet up with Jester. Over the radio, we hear Aztec in some kind of distress, and when a soldier in a supersuit is in distress, something is going on. We leg it up the cliffs, through dense dark foliage to find out what's up.

Ah. Aztec is what's up. Killed not by the North Koreans, but ripped apart from something else entirely. Crysis is planting the seeds of some kind of otherworldly force using this island as a hunting ground, Predator-style.

When a game is designed to show players graphics based on the human eye, rather than a camera sensor, with depth of focus and motion blur affects all over the place, sitting in a dark jungle with something skulking through it with intent to kill you is a little concerning.

It's not just spooky because I don't want to be eaten, thanks. It's spooky because anything could be hiding in these bushes, and it's not very long before Prophet points out some soldiers up ahead to prove the point.

Even with a stealth cloak, crouching through the bushes, I was on the receiving end of seemingly all the hurt. Sure, I killed both of these soldiers, but look how damn close I came to dying - even with a nanosuit that had a bullet shield built into it.

Crysis is brutal, not just for your graphics card, but for its difficulty. And this is on Normal! These soldiers don't run for cover and call for assistance, they just lock onto you and fire, no questions asked. I don't know how they train soldiers in the North Korean military, granted, but this is ridiculous.

When you emerge from the jungle, you're welcomed to the game with the morning sun. Congratulations. You've survived the night, learned about your nanosuit, been shown that something strange is afoot, and now the game can begin. The world is yours, sort of. Here's you're objective, catch up with me later.

And so you're left to get on with it. Sabotaging some equipment to make our lives easier. I forget the details already. The point is, here are a few soldiers, most on the beach, some in a boat, deal with them in your own way.

In the sunlight, the greenery looks lovely. Crysis is still some kind of staggering to look at, and while there are the odd blips in the framerate under certain circumstances, that's to be expected. With all of these graphical tricks thrown together, something is bound to upset your PC when things get hectic.

And get hectic it does. Each of these screens looks amazing, with fancy chromatic aberration effects when you get shot, to the obligatory red blur that says you're about to die, to the almost arty fade to black as you fall over. Crysis, even when dying, looks great.

It's a shame that's all I did, really. Die.

Use your binoculars to scout ahead. Yeah, I get that. Be quiet and stealthy. No shit. Kill one guy with a silenced weapon from the cover of a rock, and watch his mate launch a flare into the skies to call for backup, and then see the boat gunner put round after round into your brains from a mile away. "There's a guy in the bushes!" "The bushes? Ok, found him. Brrrrrrrrt."

I consider this to be the first area. Level 1. No, not even that. The tutorial test to prove you've learned something. I've learned something alright. I've learned that Normal difficulty isn't fun at all. I've learned that being a supersoldier sucks. I've learned that the North Korean military is an absolute beast, not to be confronted even from the safety of cover.

Attempt three or four - thankfully, restarts are quite quick, and the checkpoint is just at the top of the hill - I finally manage some kind of stealth, making it down without being noticed. Just a short run over to the objective and I can do some sort of smash and grab, and just run out of here afterwards.

Or not. Right. Enough of this, I'm dropping the difficulty to Easy.

Source // MobyGames

Further Frustrations

I'd like to carry on with my Crysis run, but after an hour of playing on Easy mode and getting much further through the island, I encountered more problems with insanely accurate enemies, minefields, too many graphical effects to render at once, at a stable framerate... Crysis has a crisis, basically, and I was forced to stop.

That's no big deal. The autosaves were well placed and there were plenty of them. I've played for an hour and a half now, plenty of footage to grab screenshots from, plenty of gameplay to discuss. Come on, Crysis, why have you crashed completely? Why aren't you responding. Quit. Quit damnit. And you, OBS, why won't you stop recording? Just end it already. I've got what I need. You're not responding either, are you? I've not got a video file, have I?

Crysis, and recording Crysis, was just too much for this PC.

Source // MobyGames

So what did I get up to? Loads, as it happned. I was driving jeeps, I was stealing weapons and using their own firearms against them, I was hurling grenades and watching pretty explosions - and pretty damn loud explosions, too.

Prophet would blurt out over the radio an objective for me to reach, and often a side-objective to give me something else to do, such as grabbing enemy intel. If it was further away from me than the main objective, I didn't see the point in it. I was struggling enough as it is.

Well, no, struggling isn't the right word. On Easy, enemy soldiers do drop to floor without too much trouble. They don't seem to be able to reduce my health to nothing in a few shots, put it that way. But they still spot me without any difficulty and are still stupidly accurate. They're more accurate than me - even aiming down the sights and burst firing, you can watch your own bullets go anywhere but where the red dot sight says they'll go.

If you're completely undiscovered, you can line up a headshot and spend a bullet or do to drop an enemy. If anyone is alerted, or aware of your presence, it'll take an entire magazine to do the same thing it seems. It's bizarre. I had to switch to their weapons simply because of the ammo I required.

Source // MobyGames

Source // MobyGames

Source // MobyGames

Further Fun Times

Crysis wasn't just about pretty looks. A physics engine made environments as dangerous as your imagine allowed. Want to drop a tree across a road? Shoot the tree down. Want to literally drop in on a guarded hut and throw people through the walls? Switch on your superstrength and jump on in.

You can pick up guards and hurl them at their squadmates, or pick up seemingly everything that isn't bolted to the floor and throw that too, with enemies reacting accordingly - by shooting at you all the while.

When Crysis is doing what it promises it could do, it's a game and a half. It's Far Cry on steroids. It's a game too good to be true. Screenshots from Crysis were put side-by-side with reference photos. Can you tell which is real?

Source // MobyGames

Source // MobyGames

I've no idea what Crysis looks like at its absolute best. Does anyone? Does Crytek even know? How were able to make all of this in the first place? But at least now I know what it plays like. An openish world of possiblity and punishment, with graphics that still hold up today.

Source // Steam

From what I've read, though, the story and gameplay do run out halfway through. It's teased early on that aliens are the secret problem hiding out on the island. You first see them kidnap one of your squadmates from a frosty boat, inexplicably plopped in the middle of a tropical island. Snow? In Paradise? Must be aliens.

I didn't see any after that, but then I only played for a short while afterwards. As I understand it, once you've answered the question "Can it run Crysis", you should ask "Do you want to play the second half of Crysis", to which the answer is divisive amongst players.

Final Word

After grumbling about its problems and having a nice head-clearing walk, I gave Crysis one final chance, on medium graphic settings, with God Mode invincibility, not to terrorize the North Koreans, just to not die. I was going to play Crysis as intended, otherwise.

But medium settings looking so much worse than High, and even on God Mode Easy difficulty, the enemies know where you are the very second you make a mistake in thinking you've got a headshot on one of them. I wanted fun. I wanted to be able to blow up gas stations and punch people through walls, but I didn't get any of that.

It was a faff to use my suits abilities on the fly, and the suit is what separates Crysis from Far Cry and the like. It's not the sole reason you come to play Crysis, but in the right hands it's a damn good reason to. Who wouldn't want to super sprint out of a sticky situation like the Flash?

I didn't really know what to expect from Crysis beyond its graphics and small amount of gameplay. I didn't know anything about the plot going in, but from what I gather, it teases a good story but fails to deliver one.

From the gameplay side of things, it also provides plenty of tools for interesting approaches to objectives, but then apparently also fails to give you the true freedom to do what you want, before ultimately abandoning it all to turn into a generic shooter.

Crysis set the bar for looks, but arguably nothing else. It's obviously a must play game because it the impact it had on video gaming - sure, nobody can play it now, but this is what we could all be looking at if you could all keep up with the march of technology... - but it'd be hard to champion a play for any other reason.

There are other games about the freedom to approach objectives in your own way, there are other games involving alien mysteries, there are other games with supersoldiers and these other games can do it better. Not in terms of looks, though. Not for a long while to come.

Fun Facts

The hardest difficulty has the North Koreans speak their native language, instead of shouting "He's over there" to clue you in on what they're doing, for example.

Crysis, developed by Crytek, first released in 2007.

Version played: PC, 2007.