Okay, everyone has heard about it. No doubt most of you have played it. Crysis. The game that had everyone talking for years after it was announced. It was the be the “New Benchmark For PC Systems!” offering unrivalled visuals, that looked so damn real even I, at the time an AVID RTS gamer found myself solely excited for this one game.Fan sites sprang up before the game was even released, and when the demo was released the buzz reached an all new high. With my substandard internet connection, I couldn’t download the immense file required to play it, so I happily skipped off to my local EB Games 2 days before the scheduled release date to pick it up, as most people did, and rushed home in my car, a hot little steel-book case of Crysis on my hand.
I understand that there was already consternation brewing as some countries did not receive a steel-book case with the Collector’s Edition. The Australian version certainly did, pictured below:
It even looked pretty on the inside:
The special edition contained a small 16 page art booklet, the game on a DVD, a DVD with “bonus features” (which for the record cannot be used in a conventional DVD player like the extra one in Bioshock) an unlockable APC for online multiplayer gaming and a copy of the soundtrack, which is in my humble opinion, pretty sweet.
So I fired up the game on my PC only to find that the game’s system requirements completely ate my video card for breakfast. Finally finding a sweet spot (lowest settings on a slightly higher resolution) I set about invading Korea in a spectacular fashion.
After familiarizing myself with the incredibly rad nanosuit settings, I felt very guilty. I was playing this “revolutionary game with realistic graphics”. I needed a REAL MONSTER of a PC to play this on. The answer came in the form of a phone call from a friend of mine who definitely has too much money to burn. He wanted me to come over and benchmark his PC with dual Leadtek 8800 Ultra Leviathan OC GPUs with their own water cooling units. I have never seen such an insane video card (nor an insane price, this SLI card setup ALONE is worth about the same as my current PC) as well as an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850, 6 gig of RAM, and a mouthwatering 30 inch screen. I could go on about his PC but the details would bore most. Suffice to say, he’s a crazy man with way too much money to burn.
So I brought over Crysis and fired it up in this PC and maxed out the settings. Though there were a few initial minor issues that some other computer owners reported, the game ran very smoothly. The spectacle that greeted me was indeed breathtaking… but not to the degree of realism the initial demonstrations had led me to believe.
There have been a number of jpegs floating around depicting two different versions of the jungle presented in Crysis.
Now of course the graphics are still amazing, and I haven’t even touched on the gameplay elements… especially an incredible level where you fight in zero G in an Alien spacecraft, but for all the hype I expected something a little more. The grass looks a bit fluffy, the leaves still have hard edges and the light doesn’t stream through like it did in the initial videos.
However I am still not disappointed. This game is and will remain a must have for anyone who enjoys the FPS genre, and an intelligent buy for anyone who wishes to dabble. The graphics still look amazing even if they aren’t at the level of realism first proposed. Although it wasn’t ALL that was promised us, it remains a tempting offering.
- KaTaKlysM
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