It is the near future. A meteorite crashes into a remote Pacific island and the North Koreans move in to investigate. Soon, there are reports of strange experiments and bizarre events. The United States sends in a special ops team to see just what the North Koreans are up to. You are Jake Dunn and you are part of that team. No, this is not a sequel to Far Cry. This is Crytek's next guaranteed blockbuster FPS title, Crysis.
Just like their previous hit game, Crytek has made a top priority of creating eye-popping visuals for Crysis. At that, they've already succeeded. There was a crowd of people around the Crysis monitors, their faces turned up to stare wide-eyed at sprawling, exquisitely detailed environments. Far Cry made every other game look amateur and Crysis puts even it to shame. Crytek is making their new game more real than any first person shooter has ever been before. The environments are interactive and destructible in very realistic ways. Sure there have been games before that let you shoot a tree and it will fall down. That's child's play. I watched in awe, though, as a tree was picked apart, tiny piece by tiny piece from the top down. I saw a shot-down tree fall on enemies, crushing them to death.
I saw a military vehicle that had wood panels on the back. Shooting them had no effect whatsoever on the vehicle. Shooting the spare gasoline canister on the back, though caused the rear of the vehicle to erupt in flames. It didn't destroy the vehicle, mind you, but it certainly damaged it. It's this kind of attention to extreme detail that will win Crysis awards.
Just playing around in the environment is a blast and I could spend hours doing so, but darn it we have aliens to kill. Come on, you didn't really think that was just a meteorite, did you? Much of the island is covered by an enormous energy shield that keeps the tropical heat out and the frigid cold in. The aliens, it seems, prefer air conditioning.
Soon, you'll be joining forces with the North Koreans to suppress the alien invasion. Of course, you'll have a huge array of high-tech weaponry at your disposal as well as lots of different types of vehicles and stationary armaments.
Crysis will also offer a unique new twist for multiplayer. In other games, destroyed vehicles just respawn, but in Crysis, you have to work to get them back. Players will fight over access to alien artifacts which can then be used to build the new vehicles.
Crysis is currently slated for release next winter and I can't wait to get my hands on it.
I'm a thirty-something computer programmer. I live in Delaware, but I grew up in Arkansas in a tiny town of 2500. We didn't have video arcades. Heck, it was nearly an hour's drive to anything as sophisticated as a Wal*Mart. Needless to say, my exposure to video games as a child was somewhat limited.
In the mid 80's, I cut my teeth on a used Atari 2600 bought at a flea market and a handful of games like Space Invaders and Pac Man. I was hooked in a blink. In the decades since, I've become a big fan of many genres of games. From first-person shooters to role-playing to strategy and everything in between. The only games that categorically don't interest me are sports games.
The easiest way for a game to win me over is to have a gripping story. I'll forgive a lot in a game that grabs me and keeps me interested. The inverse is true, too. If a game does not have a killer story, its gameplay had better be pretty darn compelling to make up for it. That doesn't happen very often
