Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Released on: 2007-11-16
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Platform: Windows XP

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From the makers of Far Cry comes the most technologically advanced video game ever made, with graphics to make you gasp and enemy artificial intelligence so clever it could give SkyNET a run for its money. With Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 now well established, Crysis has become the new milestone for PC graphics and first person shoot `em-ups. The premise of the game involves an alien landing on an island off North Korea, with you as the only person that can stop it. The incredibly realistic looking environments are the game's initial draw, with some particularly stunning looking jungle locales. All the levels include dynamic effects to make them even more realistic (and dangerous) including earthquakes, breaking ice, landslides and tornadoes. Since the alien decides to flash freeze the entire island half way through the game, and the final sections end up in a zero gravity spaceship, it's unlikely you're going to get tired of the same old environments.

As in Far Cry, there's no strict level structure and you're able to explore the island however you want; choosing to go in all guns blazing or taking a more stealthy approach. You can also customise your weapons to suit your preferred style of play with silencers, telescopic sights, laser sightings and more. Your special armour can also be modified as you go, so that you make less noise as you move, run faster, jump higher, recover energy or just take damage better and make use of heavier weapons. Naturally the game also includes an extensive multiplayer mode, but it is the stunning, near photorealistic, graphics and game world which is most certain to claim the game's name in PC gaming history.
HARRISON DENT

Manufacturer's Description
Crysis is a PC sci-fi first-person shooter from the award-winning developer Crytek, the developers of the critically acclaimed Far Cry (MC90).

Earth, 2019: A colossal asteroid crashes down to Earth.

The North Korean Government quickly seals off the island chain, claiming the mysteries of the asteroid for themselves. The United States responds by dispatching an elite team of Delta Force Operators to recon the situation and report back to the Pentagon. Amid rising tensions between the US and North Koreans, the asteroid suddenly bursts open, revealing a massive, 2km high alien ship. The ship generates an immense force sphere, freezing a vast portion of the island and drastically altering the global weather system. The invasion of Earth has begun.

The two rival nations unite to stop the aliens and save mankind. The newly formed alliance fights epic battles against the marauding Aliens. With hope rapidly fading, the player must lead a crack squad through lush tropical jungle, harsh frozen landscapes, and finally into the heart of the alien ship itself for the ultimate Zero G encounter with the aliens.

Crysis offers players a highly immersive FPS experience in which they will have to adapt their tactics, weaponry, armour and gameplay style to survive and defeat the alien invasion.

Crysis uses the leading-edge technology of Crytek's proprietary engine CryENGINE.

Customer Reviews

Arguably the best FPS ever....
At the back end of 2007 i owned an ageing PC.I was aware Crysis was generating lots of hype and rave reviews and it provided a ready made excuse for me to upgrade.So you could say i had to spend the best part of £700 in order to play it.Was i dissapointed?Not one bit.I would rate Crysis in the same bracket as Half Life 1/2 and Far Cry (also developed by Crytek).I'll now tell you why.

The nanosuit is an ingenius idea which lets you play the game however you want.If you want to take a cavalier approach you can,but the game is far more rewarding if you adopt the stealth angle and play it mostly in cloak mode.Obviously the objectives will always be the same no matter how many times you play through,but how you achieve these is directly down to you.For example,the 1st KPA soldier you encounter can be pacified with non-lethal ammo,grabbed and thrown into the sea/against a nearby rock,or just shot outright,with or without a silencer.There really is that many ways to go about things.

Weapons can be customised on the fly.Most accomodate a silencer,flashlight,grenade launcher and various scopes.

The vehicles are no less fun to drive than they were in Far Cry and the tank in particular is an absolute joy,although you only get one for a very small portion of the game.

The graphics are a revelation.Never have foliage,water and explosions looked this good.My PC consists of a Geforce 8800 GT,2GB DDR RAM,and a Pentium Core Duo E6750 2.66 GHZ.The game auto detected on high settings for everything and it runs amazingly well,with only the slightest of slowdown in extreme occasions.

The story is very immersive and the level where you take out multiple AA batteries is a classic example of how you can tackle things in your own way.I have done this differently each time i have played through.

The only bad point i feel is worth mentioning is a level near the end when you fly a VTOL.The handling is shocking to say the least,but this level is so brief that it doesn't detract from the game in any way.

The controls also cater for joypad support,but who would want to use one over a mouse and keyboard?Certainly not me.

I would also recommend that any veteran of the FPS genre play the game on Delta difficulty.It purely removes the cross hairs,but doesn't effect scopes on weapons and is eminently manageable.

All in all Crysis is not only a triumph of technology and graphical brilliance,but it is a timely evolution of the first person shooter.It's just a shame that a lot of people will miss out due to not having the required spec machine to play it.My advice to you would be to buy one.I did.And i haven't regretted it for a second...

Solid game, but a short running time and limited freedom weaken its appeal.
Back in 2004 a hitherto unknown company called CryTek released a game called Far Cry. In a year that also saw the long-awaited releases of both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, Far Cry was a surprisingly successful break-out hit, marrying the excellent graphics of those games with a semi-freeform approach to missions that was truly exihilirating. The sense of freedom it brought to the normally linear-as-hell first-person shooter market was quite revolutionary, and it has arguably aged better than either of its competitors due to its much greater replay value. Crysis is not the sequel to Far Cry, since Electronic Arts snatched up CryTek and their next game whilst the Far Cry brand name remains with Ubisoft (who are currently developing the Africa-set Far Cry 2 for a late 2008/early 2009 release), but it is the 'spiritual successor'.

Crysis is set in 2020. North Korea has occupied an island in the Pacific Ocean where something unusual has been uncovered by an archaeological expedition. The UN has sent in a team of special operatives using new nanosuit technology to investigate, resulting in guerrila warfare against the North Koreans before the situation escalates and a full-scale war looks set to unfold over the island, resulting in the deployment of two US carrier groups to the area. And then the object the expedition has uncovered wakes up...

So far, so traditional. Crysis builds on the success of its predecessor by retaining the tropical island setting but ramping its graphical capabilities to the max. Make no mistake, Crysis is the single most graphically-advanced computer game on the market, a position it will retain for some years to come given the somewhat conservative looks of its nearest competitors. That said, the game scales excellently: my two-and-a-half-year-old single-core machine coped with most settings at Medium, and it looked substantially better than the still-gorgeous Far Cry with everything turned up to maximum.

Of course, graphical excellence is nothing without the gameplay to back it up and Crysis delivers on that score. It's a fast-paced action game but, like Far Cry before it, it also allows you to play stealthily and gives you more options, such as more silenced weapons and a camouflage field ability, to make use of that tactic. The game also allows for more effective hand-to-hand combat. The nanosuit allows you to increase your speed, strength or armour throughout the game depending on the situation, although to be honest you rarely need to take it off armour mode, but it's a nice touch. Weapons selection is surprisingly poor, however. The UN-issue SCAR rifle is great but you have to ditch it as soon as you run out of ammo and switch to the North Korean automatic rifle, which has the stopping power of a gnat in a hurricane. Entire clips are sometimes needed to take down one enemy soldier. The shotgun is great but ineffective at range, whilst the minigun tears through ammo so fast it's barely worth using. The gauss rifle and the infinite-recharge ice weapon you get at the end of the game are both excellent, but since you only get them five minutes before the game ends, hardly astonishing.

Crysis is a pretty good game that fixes many of the sins of Far Cry. There is less messing around indoors, the story and characters are much better-developed, there's a much greater sense of coherence in how the missions and levels fit together and a solid sense of camaderie once what appears to be the entire US Marine Corps lands on the island to provide some back-up in the latter half of the game. Unfortunately, it also takes some retrograde steps. Whilst multiple routes to mission objectives are again provided, they are much more constrained than before. This is because whilst Far Cry took place across multiple islands, Crysis takes place in sectioned-off areas of one big island, and the game won't let you just wander off at will. This decreased freedom from its predecessor is extremely irritating, given it's one of the appeals of CryTek's work. Secondly, CryTek have astonishingly not yet figured out that whilst we enjoy fighting intelligently-designed human opponents, having lumbering mutants or in this case (spoiler!) ice-based, gravity-bending aliens turn up just feels lame, especially when they can take ten times as much ammo to kill compared to the superhumanly damage-resistant human enemies.

The other major problem, one increasingly prevalent in the FPS genre, is the establishing of Crysis as a franchise. We can't have one good, long game and that's it, we've got to have a major cliffhanger ending, followed by the news that Crysis is a trilogy with part two due in 2009 and part three in 2011, and finally the news that there will be a 'parallel' game following another character through the same events, with the first of these, Crysis: Warhead, coming out in late 2008. Sometimes the sheer avariceness of the computer game industry is startling, especially when the developers proudly tell us that the game has sold a million copies in six months but it could have sold more if piracy wasn't around, so as a result the sequels will be co-developed for the consoles and may not be as visually impressive as a result. And to finally put the boot in, Crysis is quite short: at about eight hours to completion, Crysis is substantially shorter than Far Cry, Half-Life 2, FEAR or a lot of other recent FPS games.

Crysis (***½) looks a million dollars even on relatively underpowered machines and is a huge amount of fun to play. However, it won't last very long, has a huge cliffhanger ending and scales back on the amount of freedom you have. The game is available now for PC in the UK and US. The 'parallel' game, Crysis: Warhead, will be released in November 2008, with Crysis II likely to follow a year later.

great game few problems though...
I love how this game handles. The special abilities are awsume and the graphics are better than any game i have ever palyed the physics are even better.
On the other hand the online play is impossible to set up. I duno whether its jst my personal exsperience but i cant join any game and i have updated it fully... there is little to no help available surpose ill have to ring up .. never had to do that before.
Another problem im having is that i cant load my saved games... i have a really good computer i think its the game bt i might be wrong still this is not the easiest set up and smooth running game im used to.
I do recomend call of duty4 and this game if these problems are only confinded to my computer.