Sunday 21 August 2011

Finished Crysis

Technically I haven't finished Crysis but I've got past the bit where the aliens show up which counts as finished when you're playing a Crytek game. Not only did I get that far, but I played the stealth bit, the escort mission bit, the turret gunner bit and the Halo rip off bit before stopping at the fly a plane bit, all of which featured pretty uninspired alien design.

As I mentioned previously, I found Crysis incredibly refreshing because it had the balls to be a shooter that did the best parts of the previous game much much better with new game play mechanic twists (the Nano suit, destructible terrain), as opposed to a genre-bending wannabe sim/open world game/RPG which is what shooters have sadly turned into in too many cases.

(Please note I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series enough to be bothered to punctuate it correctly, Far Cry 2 and ARMA 2 for their crazy ambition, TF2 for its class design etc. But does it have to be every game?)

But I don't think you should play Crysis because it's incredibly fun, or because its beautiful, or because your graphics card can finally handle it. I think you should play it because two thirds of the way through the game it drops you into a zero gravity alien maze and teaches you seamlessly how to navigate it and fight the enemies inside, which are the first truly alien aliens I've seen in a game.

It is a classy piece of game design. I wish the final third had turned into Prey, not Halo.

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