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Crysis is something of a double-edged sword. It's the best-looking video game you will have ever seen, but barely any computers will be able to run it well enough to take advantage of the stunning world that Crytek have created. Nevertheless, it's a fantastically good-looking game, even on low settings — but if any game will convince you to splash out on an upgrade, it's this. Most of the hype surrounding the alien-tinged shooter has revolved around the graphics — and rightly so. They're stupendous, amazing, fantastic, brilliant and any other adjective you want to throw at them.

You begin the game in the jungle environment that became so familiar in the preceding FarCry and, my god, it's spectacular — you can almost feel the humid, luscious leaves dripping through your monitor and the crunch of undergrowth underfoot as you sneak up on a cadre of Koreans. Rocks trickle with moisture, and the world around you patters with the tiny feet of small animals. Shrubs wobble and react to the minute movements of your colleagues brushing past them, and larger trees are literally shot away as gunfire rages about. (If enough bullets pass through the trunk, it'll fall over — and it falls depending on where it's been shot, tumbling down onto whatever may lie beneath it, so barrels may be scattered or a fence ruined.)

I won't talk about what other environments you'll be exploring as part of the larger plot of Crysis — as I don't want to spoil a fantastic surprise. Rest assured, they're all as immense and beautiful as the island you parachute onto from the start. It's difficult to express just how attractive Crytek's creation is, and it will be difficult to appreciate it for a year or two until proper hardware becomes available. Put it on your list of ambitions: Make sure that you play Crysis on full-fat, maxed-out DX10 settings before you die.

The staggeringly attractive world — really, it's difficult to believe that something that good-looking has been created and is matched with such horrendously commendable ambition — is matched by the people and things that inhabit it. Every object can be picked up and thrown — down to fish, bottles, frying pans and live chickens; just look for comedy videos on YouTube — the environment is fully interactive. Every object has physics, so run cascade into some boxes with your truck, and they'll tumble out of the way, even rolling farther if they travel down a slope. Enemies respond in much the same way if you blast them in a room with a shotgun: On hitting a set of shelves, arms will be molded around the wood before they topple to the floor in a heap. The physics are amazing and, along with the graphics, a ground-breaking technical achievement that should be savoured.

This is helped by the free-roaming nature of the game that was first debuted in FarCry and is refined in Crysis. Sure, you have objectives and secondary missions available, but it's up to you how you complete them. An early order is to infiltrate a village to rescue an archaeologist, and the beauty of Crysis is that unlike, say, Medal of Honor or Call of Duty — fine games, but hugely linear — you can choose how you achieve your goal. She's incarcerated in the school, and the settlement is surrounded by mines. Steal a speedboat and roar up the beach, leaping out, blasting enemies away with shotguns. Use your cloaking option to creep past the enemy guards and their powerful machine-guns through the school and to the hostage — before blasting your way out past some tanks. Trek through the jungle and cloak, using the scope on your assault rifle with a silencer attached to take out the enemy — before cloaking again to make sure they can't see you. Or wander in, all guns blazing, blowing the Koreans away left and right. These are only a handful of options for completing one task. And this kind of flexible gameplay absolutely defines Crysis.

You're aided in your Korean-quashing quest by a special "nano" suit that's part HUD-provider and part Superhero Button. Pressing the middle mouse button opens a circular menu, and moving the mouse in a direction selects several powers: speed, power, armor, cloaking or a weapon menu to customize your armaments. Each ability is hugely useful — especially cloaking — and enables you to jump over higher objects or last longer against the Korean enemies who are, incidentally, incredibly difficult to kill sometimes — taking several headshots, I suppose, to compensate for your over-powered suit.

The weaponry you're provided with is, like the gameplay, typically versatile. Initially, you can access a typical range of first-person-shooter guns — pistols you can dual-wield, assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers and grenades. Later on, you're able to use alien weaponry, and most of the guns can be customized to stupidly entertaining proportions: Never before will you have attached a silencer or sniper scope to a shotgun — or a rocket launcher. It's mad and over-the-top and fits in with the science-fiction exaggeration of Crysis perfectly.

The plot, once you're gazing at the stunning world, doesn't seem to matter much — but it's entertaining and absorbing, resulting in a game with fantastic pace. It suffers, unfairly, by being buried beneath the visual impact of the game. I think Crysis may look, in fact, too good.

Without giving much away, the North Koreans have captured a team of archaeologists investigating an asteroid — as they suspect something a bit more exciting than a lump of rock has crash-landed into the tropical paradise. You're going in — as Nomad, a Delta Force soldier — with the rest of your team to rescue the hostages and find out what's going on. The plot is pure science fiction, but that helps the game: How much sci-fi takes place in dark, dingy dystopian cities compared to tropical islands? It's a breath of fresh, fruity, humid jungle air.

As if creating one of the finest games of the decade with the best graphics ever isn't enough, Crytek has managed to include a competent and entertaining multiplayer portion that, whilst perhaps lacking the depth and subtlety of rival multiplayer-centric games like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, still deserves to gather a dedicated online community who should take full advantage of the included editor to mod the game. There are 12 maps split across two modes: a straight deathmatch and the slightly tactical "Power Struggle," in which two teams of up to 16 players each try to destroy the respective enemy headquarters. In this mode, objectives must be completed to earn money to buy more ammo and upgrades for your basic nano suit — just like in the original Counter Strike or recent money-grabbing gambling experiment Kwari. The battles can be potentially epic — what other first-person shooter offers 10-hour games?

Vehicles are available in this mode and in the single-player campaign. There's a massive variety to choose from, ranging from huge, powerful tanks to basic local trucks that let you pootle from objective to objective a little quicker, and they make exploring the islands much more fun and efficient. Like the rest of the Crysis world, they're governed by a rich and hugely rewarding physics engine that means you can shoot out individual tyres to hamper a truck full of enemies heading towards you, or dent wing mirrors, or shatter panes of glass. The expansive, addictive and absorbing world of Crysis never, ever fails to utterly impress.

It's a remarkable, stunning achievement: one that's not been bettered since, arguably, Half-Life — and one that might not be beaten for years. Fantastically written plot, well-paced, reactive, deep and intelligent physics, a truly explorable and interactive world filled with clever characters and chuckable objects. Crysis is a perfect jungle playground coupled with Oscar-quality film tradition and production values. It's also, quite simply, the best-looking game that's ever been made. And I'm saying that when the vast majority of people, myself included, will be gawping at the tropical climes of Crysis through hardware that just isn't designed to handle it. Give it a year or two, upgrade your machine and load Crytek's creation then — and you'll still be staring in awe, even more so when you can fully appreciate what the game can do. Crysis is the future, and I can't wait to get there.