Crysis™ and Crysis Warhead™

Pamantul in 2019. O echipa de oameni de stiinta din SUA face o descoperire infricosatoare pe o insula din Marea Chinei de Sud. Contactul cu echipa se pierde atunci cand Guvernul Nord Coreean izoleaza zona in mare graba. SUA raspunde prin trimiterea unei echipe de elita a Delta Force Operators pentru a investiga situatia. In timp ce tensiunile cresc intre cele doua natiuni, o nava extraterestra uriasa isi face aparitia in mijlocul insulei. Nava genereaza un glob imens de energie care ingheata o mare parte din insula si afecteaza in mod drastic temperatura globala. Acum Coreea de Nord si SUA tebuie sa isi uneasca fortele pentru a lupta impotriva primejdiei. Amenintat de perspective din ce in ce mai sumbre, tu trebuie sa porti lupte eroice prin jungla tropicala, peisaje inghetate si in final, in inima navei extraterestre.

Gen:First Person Shooter
Publicat de Electronic Arts


Crysis is one of, if not the,
most stunningly beautiful games we've ever seen. But even beyond that,
it's a pretty fantastic shooter. Solid weapons, intelligent enemies,
and fairly open level designs mix with nano-suit powers to make this
one of the more entertaining ballistic showdowns in some time.

The fact that developer Crytek has figured out how to create a story
that doesn't drip with cheese helped immerse us into a "realistic" and
exciting near-future. Voice acting is pretty good, the in-game
cutscenes are well designed to never take you out of the action, and
the aliens are actually menacing and dangerous, unlike the campy
Trigens of Far Cry. Crytek has obviously learned a lot about
presentation and storytelling since their first effort. I found myself
caring about the story that's there and wanting to kick the aliens off
of our planet. If they hadn't pulled a Halo 2 at the end, I would have
been totally pleased with the story that helps the game progress
forward.

As with 2004's Far Cry, Crysis takes place on a picturesque island
paradise lush with vegetation and surrounded by gorgeous blue water.
The impressive visuals are so far beyond Far Cry's that it's hard to
even comprehend what Crytek, given another few years of development
time, will be able to come up with. It's not only the technical aspects
that are impressive; it's the detail of the models, architecture, and
textures. Whether it's the frost on the gun barrels or change in color
of the nano-suit for different abilities, the little touches are
everywhere. When you're staring up through the snow at the oppressive
presence of the alien mothership buried in the mountain, wandering
through the maze of rock and metal tunnels underneath its surface,
tromping through the dense jungle, or simply looking into the face of
one of the awesome character models, it's impossible not to be awed at
what Crytek managed to do technically.

Thankfully, the art team was given the chance to expand their horizons
from simple jungles to include the spectacularly disorienting innards
of an alien ship and an ice-blasted mountainside. The inside of the
ship is especially breathtaking. The greens and greys are spectacularly
mixed with bright alien lights and the thin-skinned aliens themselves.
The contrast between the rough rock walls covered in crystals and the
heavy technology of the aliens is pretty striking as well. The
character models which rival even Half-Life 2's are especially
remarkable. There's not as much emotion, but the slight cartoony style
chosen allows for suspension of disbelief and sidesteps the creepy
Beowulf effect. Like HL2, there's a lot of detail in the facial
textures and while the lip synching can be a tiny bit off-putting from
time to time, these are some truly amazing representations of humans.
The one thing that you're going to have to seriously consider before
purchasing the game specifically for the visuals is the power of your
PC. Crysis may very well kick your computer in the balls at Very High
settings. It'll look spectacular doing so, but may very well turn into
more of a slideshow than you'd probably prefer and in some cases become
completely unplayable. On our Vista test machine with a quad core
processor, 4GB RAM, and a single 8800 GTX, we had some pretty
significant slowdowns with everything on very high everywhere but the
most confined spaces. Tweaking the settings in DirectX10 helped a bit
(you can fiddle with the settings to get just the right mix of
resolution and detail in all the settings) while running the game in
DX9 solved all of our problems and still looked spectacular with
everything on high. We even could run DX9 on high at 1920x1200 with a
good enough framerate to be comfortable playing nearly the entire time.
In those rare moments where things began to chug, it was an easy enough
thing to simply change the resolution for a minute, which can all be
done in game, while loaded into the game, which is another terrific
feature that's sadly missing from so many other titles. Luckily, for
those of you without the best computers, Crysis still looks pretty
fantastic on Medium. You won't get the same features, but Crysis never
really gets ugly and still looks at least as good as Far Cry even on
Low, though you will get a pretty significant amount of pop in at that
level.
Thankfully the gameplay in Crysis, while not quite
equal to the visuals, is also well worth the while. Crytek manages to
make you feel like a badass thanks to the high-tech nano-suit, which
has four settings to help with combat situations. Armor helps you get
through straight up firefights, absorbs more damage, and helps
regenerate health and power more quickly; speed will help you zip
around the environment, flank enemies and run away when in trouble;
strength is good for jumping up to high places, steadying aim, and
beating enemies to death; and stealth, which we used the most in our
time with Crysis single player, allows you to cloak for a short amount
of time. Every ability is balanced by how quickly it uses the suit's
power reserve, which adds some strategy to each situation. While we
found ourselves using stealth more often than other powers, levels are
designed with all of the powers in mind to allow you to choose your
style of play. If you don't want to use stealth very often, don't.
It'll provide a different pace and difficulty level. Whatever ability
you become most familiar with, switching between them is easy. You can
bind them to whatever keys you'd like, but can also simply use the
radial menu brought up with the middle mouse button (default). By the
end of single player it'll be second nature.The amount freedom in the level design, in terms of where you can go, is pretty comparable to Far Cry's. While the game is
pretty linear for the story's sake, it's not a corridor shooter.
There's a lot of wiggle room when it comes to tactics and approaches to
killing enemies and the path you take through a level. If you want to
simply steal a boat and jet across a lagoon to the other side, feel
free, but you can also skitter around the edge near the road, head up
higher into the jungle, or sneak along the shore. There are several
secondary objectives that also aren't compulsory for success, but will
provide little advantages of intelligence.

The human AI in Crysis isn't perfect, but it is pretty
damn good. The occasional clumping of human enemies does happen, but
you'll also see patrols try their best to flank you and stay spread out
while the hunt you down. They aren't really scared by the fact that you
have super speed and strength even if it gives you an advantage.
They'll still come after you guns blazing, calling for their friends
the entire time.

Being able to cloak gives the enemy the most problems. They won't be
able to locate you if you use a silencer and use cover wisely since
shooting disables the cloak. Shooting without a silencer will give up
your position to the AI and they'll converge pretty quickly, chattering
away the whole time. The trade off here is that using a silencer makes
whatever gun you're using less powerful. When you do
cloak and the AI can't see you, but is wary and knows you're in the
area, they'll drop get into an alerted stance while creeping through
the forest. If they see you cloak, they'll blast away at the
spot you were last seen for a moment until they realize you're not
there. They'll chatter to each other as well about whether they can see
you, what they're doing, and so on.


We had a chance to try out the second level of the game's single-player
campaign, which starts out behind the wheel of an armored personnel
carrier escorting O'Neill, a pilot who accompanies you on this
mission--in this case, in an unarmed jeep driving just ahead of you.
Our first mission was to escort O'Neill along a coastal jungle road to
the landing site of a downed VTOL carrier. The APC handled rather
easily and the mounted antivehicle gun was controlled independently by
mouselook, so it was easy to tear apart the enemy vehicles that lay in
wait for us along the road at various points. Because the game takes
place on the same island and in the same time frame as the original
game, our primary enemies were North Korean soldiers, most of which
were equipped with standard military weaponry and vehicles--though a
few of them had second-rate nanosuits which gave them a bit of extra
staying power. Though it was difficult to acquire some of the foot
soldiers using the mounted gun, we were also able to dispatch them
simply by running them down.
Once we hit the dropzone, we jumped out of the vehicle and met
up with a few friendly soldiers who were also helping defend the
aircraft. This led to our first firefight as we defended the VTOL on an
elevated rise against soldiers that continuously poured out of the
jungle. The enemies seemed pretty smart about using cover, both from
fallen jungle debris and from smoke bombs, so picking them off wasn't
easy. Apparently, Crysis Warhead will allow for about four times the
number of computer-controlled enemies onscreen as in the previous game,
and the pacing will reflect this fact. While Crysis emphasized stealth
and careful tactics, Warhead will incorporate many more heavy-duty gun
battles--you'll also have access to an expanded arsenal including a
grenade launcher and dual submachine guns you can carry in each hand.
Ammo won't be in short supply, nor will manipulable items--you'll find
plenty of barrels and other objects to hurl at your foes, and you'll
also be still able to seize enemy soldiers by the throat, as well as
picking up any ducks (yes, ducks) that happen to be wandering around
the VTOL landing site.
After clearing the area and clearing the flyer for launch, we
hopped back into the APC to rendezvous with the VTOL at a nearby harbor
factory guarded by entrenched infantry soldiers. This installment is
intended to be cleared on foot, though we were able to crash our APC
through the entry barriers and bring it with us into the base by some
feat of tremendous skill, or tremendous luck (it was dark and noisy in
the E3 room, so it was hard to tell). While on foot, we had a chance to
play with some of the nanosuit's abilities, such as the invisibility
power, that lets you sneak up on nearby enemies and get the drop on
them, as well as the strength ability, which lets you hurl the
aforementioned barrels down onto your enemies' heads.
Crysis Warhead seems like it will offer all the action of the
original game and then some. Now that Crysis fans are more acclimated
to the powers of the nanosuit, they'll likely be able to make better
use of it, and the game's expanded arsenal, against Warhead's larger
groups of smart, tough enemies