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Smile UK Store - Crysis (PC DVD)
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List Price: £34.00
Our Price: £24.98
Availability: Usually dispatched within 2 to 5 weeks
Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Manufacturer Maximum Age: 18
Audience Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Binding: Video Game
Brand: Electronic Arts
EAN: 5030930052645
Label: Electronic Arts
Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
Manufacturer Minimum Age: 132
Platform: Windows XP
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 2007-11-16
Studio: Electronic Arts
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Editorial Reviews:
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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
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Believe the hype
Comment: I played the demo when it first came out and at the time I didn't particularly have a great rig, I could only play Crysis on all low settings. At first I thought gameplay was average, I wasn't really trying the game out to see what the gameplay was like but more to do with how good my pc could run it at the time.
How the tables have turned; I recently got myself a powerful gaming rig and I decided to try the demo again and well what can I say, my system's optimal settings recommended high and it plays like a dream. Now that I own the game I have managed to tweak some settings and I have a mixture of high and very high and it runs as smooth as silk, personally I cannot enjoy a game unless the graphics are as amazing as they should be; This is important as it really sets the atmosphere of the game making the gameplay more immersive.
Gameplay wise, very fun indeed a lot of the content is similar to other shooters but hasn't all first person shooter games got the same kind of conecpt? However a lot of it is also origional, AI is one of the best I've seen in a fps game (not scripted and use environment to their advantage etc) Your nano suit is what keeps you alive, this is a very interesting new feature and it works well.
The story/plot is some what familiar and you do feel like you have been here before, but at the same time it is unique in it's own way and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.
The multiplayer aspect of it is the only downside to Crysis which is why I only gave it 4 stars, it is a game designed more for single player and it feels like Crytek put the multiplayer in at the last minute.
Over all fantastic gameplay, beautiful graphics not so good multiplayer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Really good fun
Comment: Hi all i bougth this game on release i didnt have a very good systme then pt4 processor 8500gt and so on terriable on a system with no bulk.
But if you have a powerfull system which i have now and be able to run it on high or even very high it looks very pleasing the only draw back is that its story gets a bit pradictable.
Those who rated it 1 star saying my system is good ect and only can run it low/medium well the thing is it did cost over 5 million to creat so it will need a bulky system.
The card i have is a 3850 overclocked by aroun 75hz on both core speed and memory. And i can run it on very high at 1024/768 runs smooth lose a few frames somtimes but nothing to interfer with the game.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fail to see what the fuss is about
Comment: I saw some game reviews, videos and screenshots for this game recently and my interest was peaked. There's a lot of fuss and it seemed, on the surface, to be deserved. I had a look at the main site for the game and found a demo I could download. After playing the demo I am glad I didn't buy this game. I might have thought that the demo was not representative of the actual game, until I started reading the bad reviews which commented on the game play issues that I found. It seemed that there were a lot of very nice features and good ideas that have been poorly realised. I haven't played a PC FPC since Rainbow Six 3, which is a game I'd prefer to play over Crysis.
I can see how this game would appeal to a bigger fan of FPCs than myself. For those of you who only flirt with FPCs it is probably a good idea to download the demo first to see if you like it or just not bother with it. There are no doubt far better FPCs on the market that would make less demands on your PC.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Arguably the best FPS ever....
Comment: 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...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid game, but a short running time and limited freedom weaken its appeal.
Comment: 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.
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