Review: Crysis -- Not Worth Upgrading a PC for

Here's my review of Crysis . Honestly, I'm not that happy with it, but what the hell, I'll post it anyway.

Many people have been wondering when a game will come out that will match the artistic and cultural relevance as say, The Godfather. While that day hasn't occurred yet, Crytek has manage to release gaming's version of Independence Day - A flashy, loud piece of entertainment that will make people go ‘ohhhh' and ‘ahhhh' before realizing that how empty the experience ultimately becomes.

While beautiful, you'll soon figure out that everything in Crysis follows typical generic 1st-person shooter dogma. A group of super-soldiers using state-or-the-art nano suits have been dispatched to find and rescue a team of archeologists who have been held hostage by the North Korean military. You as Nomad, will be tasked to battle the same group of stereotypical Korean soldiers (on foot, on boats, driving hummers and flying the occasional helicopter) for most of the game. That is until you inexplicitly encounter Korean's using the same type of hi-tech, state-of-the-art nano suits that your team is equipped with.

How the hell does a nation that can't even feed its own people manage to both steal, and then manufacture a state-or-the-art piece of equipment not even in wide use by the United States military? Well, the game doesn't even bother to come up with a logical solution; but then again, the writers of Independence Day never gave a logical answer to how someone can write and upload a virus destroying an entire alien fleet using a laptop; they just assumed that the audience wouldn't care about that little hole in logic.

After about 60% into the game - after an odd foray into a zero-gravity spaceship - the aliens start to invade, and instead of battling clones of Korean soldiers, you're tasked with fighting back waves of the same four different types of aliens for the rest of the game.

While weapons are your typical variety of shotguns, rocket launchers and machineguns - pretty much the same old stuff we've been using since Doom -- I did like the fact that once you obtained an upgrade for your weapon(silencer, flashlight, etc...), it's yours, even if you discard the weapon or you die. In addition, you have access to four separate suit powers: Armor (absorb damage), Speed (rapid movement), Strength (jump higher, grab enemies) and Cloak (temporary invisibility). While neat, in practical terms, the only powers that I used frequently were Cloak and Armor. Strength was useless except for the times when I needed to jump a high platform, and speed ran out too quickly to be of much use. While they are neat, the suit powers in practice aren't as useful as they could have been.

Obviously, the one area where the game really shines is the graphics, provided you have the rig to run this beast at full settings. Even with my 9800 GTX card, I was only able to enable a mix between high and very high settings; even then, I was getting 25-30 FPS running at a resolution of 1360 X 768 (HDTV). Since a lot of people are running the game at a higher resolution, most of the settings will have to be set a little lower. To its credit, Crysis is one of the few games where I had no trouble playing at relativity low framerate, as the motion blur helps cut down on the choppiness. Unfortunately, since most people won't be able to play this game at higher than medium (if at all), most of the eye candy effects like physics don't actually impact real-world gameplay; while it's cool to see a shack be blown into little fragments, it's mostly just fluff.

Bottom Line: There is one huge difference however. While Independence Day was a huge investment for the studio, the consumer only had to pay around ten bucks to experience the mediocrity. On the other hand, most gamers who want to experience Crysis' jaw-dropping visuals will have to - at the very least - drop 175-dollars on either an ATI 4850 HD or an Nvidia 9800 GTX videocard; that's assuming that one already has a computer with a decent CPU and two-gigs or RAM. Then you're looking at spending an additional 500-dollars on a decent PC. Quite frankly, it's not worth it to spend so much to play a game that quite frankly, does little to separate itself from other FPS games like Bioshock and the elk. While the graphics are nice, they aren't nice enough to justify the huge jump in system requirements from say, Gears of War or Call of Duty 4. While Crysis is an ok game if you can find it for 30 bucks or less, there is no reason to spend 700 dollars just to play what is essentially, the videogame equivalent of a cheesy summer movie.

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• I'm thinking about starting a blogger account and start duel-posting there (and possibly start posting non game-related stuff).

• Hurricane season may be knocking on my door later tonight...doh... Let's hope I have power later tonight. If I do, I may post something else tonight.

• I was hoping to do another Cross-Examination soon, but that's not looking likely. Booo. Oh well, them are the breaks when your partner hits the big time I suppose.

• I'm going to try to finish Bionic Commando tonight, if weather permits of course.

• R.I.P AGI. We had some great times...

• Been playing Soul Caliber 4 on the 360 (Gamefly finally sent me a copy). So far, I'm not getting in to it as much as the the past SC's. Partly because the Star Wars character, The Apprentice is quite possibly the cheapest character in a fighting game since Akuma.

• I've also been playing Ninja Gaiden 2. So far, the game is 'meh.

• No Hurricane tonight! First good news that's happened to me in months. It's a goo dthing to, because god, I've been on the brink of depression for awhile now.