| 
| From: Electronic Arts
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $29.95
You Save: $10.04 (25%)
New (33) Used (8) from $22.99
Rating:  175 reviews
Sales Rank: 703
Platforms: Windows Xp, Windows Vista
Genre: Shooter Action Games
ESRB: Mature
Media: DVD
Edition: Standard
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Operating System: Windows XP
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: 15266
Model: Crysis
UPC: 014633152661
EAN: 0014633152661
ASIN: B000PS2XDO
Release Date: November 13, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Sealed
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 175
 Ignore Mike Powell November 15, 2007
Pete (Charlotte, NC USA)
17 out of 24 found this review helpful
The rater with 3 stars is an idiot, ignore him.
Who cares about multi-monitor, get a nice 21 or 24 inch and you're set. The dialog is pretty good, especially the part where the Koreans speak, you know, Korean (but you can set them to English if you want).
The story is a mix of a special ops kind of game and something Cthulu-inspired, I'll leave it at that.
The suit and its powers are kind of the key to the whole thing. They are sci-fi extensions of what we see now, brief bursts of strength, healing, etc. A little fantastic, yes, but this is a GAME, you know, something where you pick up health packs and what not. Why anybody who picks up a GAME is surprised says something about their intelligence.
The kills are finally difficult. I have always wondered why the hero can take a bunch of rounds, wear all kinds of armor, yet the baddies are cut down in droves. Mr. Mike Powell is just a bad shot. Pump a bunch of sub-sonic rounds into the torso of a Korean soldier wearing body armor, and yes, it's a tough kill. On the other hand, sneak up behind one and put a couple pistol rounds in the back of their head, and that's it. The kills aren't hard, they are realistic.
The AI is very good, but not perfect. Once in a while they seem oblivious, other times they all scurry over to see what the noise is all about. They use a semblance of squad tactics. They try to flank you. And, something very rare, they may even run away if you lay waste to enough of their fellows.
I have a quad-core Intel CPU, 7800 GT card, 2 gigs RAM.....and Windows Vista. It runs like a dream at the highest settings. Mr. Powell apparently failed to read that Crysis is designed for DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. Ooops for him. Trust me, with a good gamer system built in the last 6 months, you will see every leaf and branch moving and reacting, getting brushed aside by your gun barrel, getting shot or blown off, etc.
CoD 4 is nice, but it's just the same old rat maze every other CoD has had. I get tired of having to move along one path and fight endlessly spawning bad guys until I move past a checkpoint. THAT is hokey. Crysis is more like the Rainbow Six games, where there are set numbers of enemies and it's up to you how you want to pick them off. Personally, I just like driving a truck into their camps full bore and leap out guns blazing, but you can snipe them too.
So don't be a Mike Powell - get you a top of the line Vista machine and enjoy Crysis, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed....
 Eye Candy Galore, But Way Too Short November 20, 2007
Mark (PA USA)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
This game feels more like a long demo rather than a complete title. Just when you think the game is going to move onto the next chapter, the soundtrack builds to a crescendo and the credits start rolling. The game abruptly ends after a few hours of gameplay. It seems to me that this game was more of an experiment with the new CryEngine 2 and DirectX 10 support rather than an actual game. As in "The Empire Strikes Back", the storyline in Crysis leaves you hanging. It does not end when the game does! The game ends with your squad leader going AWOL and you have to find him. You know they're going to charge you more money later on to find out what happens when you meet up with him. If people pay the full retail price for a game, shouldn't they get the full game all at once up front? Pay $50 now and wait a year to spend another $40 on an "expansion pack" just to finish the game. What kind of underhanded garbage is that? That should have happened in the first place! If it's not finished, don't sell it!
The audio is atrocious. It's just bad. I mean, the audio in this game is so unsynchronized with the rest of the game that during an in-game movie, the computer *appeared* to freeze, but was just trying to sync the game up with the dialogue. It took about 30 long seconds of waiting to see if the problem was with my computer or not. This is a recurring problem on many other peoples' computers, even with the latest Sound Blaster cards. There have been many times during an intense battle where the sound of the guns has dropped out altogether, and the dialogue is extremely choppy. EA needs to work on a patch for this audio problem. I ran the game with the -DX9 command line parameter to play the game in DirectX 9 mode, and the audio was *STILL* choppy and full of delays.
Please, please wait until the price on this game has gone down. I know you want to see how the game looks with DirectX 10 graphics, but there is a demo of this game available for free online. Crysis is yet another expensive big-name game you can complete over the weekend on the most difficult setting without any cheating (which I did - unless you consider using the quicksave and quickload feature cheating).
*************************************************************************
[Now onto the good stuff - yes, there are good things about this game....]
I really liked the motion blur, and the shading in DX10 is out of this world. I have not seen a more beautifully rendered computer or video game on the market. Even BioShock, which is supposed to support DirectX 10, doesn't come close to the realism of the graphics in this game. The close-ups with the enemy are breathtaking. If you have all the video settings to "Very High" and are running on DX10, when you go toe-to-toe with a bad guy in the middle of the day while on the beach, and decide to melee attack him, it looks so incredibly real that you might forget you are playing a game. The facial expressions are very detailed and well put together. It's just scary real. There was a time in computer/video gaming where you were doing a great job if you used three triangles to make a nose. This is by far light years ahead of those days (and the rest of the competition, for that matter).
The gameplay is good. I love the quick save/quick load feature. I hate when games don't have it. The different abilities of the character's suit are fun, too. Too many bad guys flanking you? Turn the cloak on and retreat. Can't jump high enough to reach that ledge? Use the maximum strength setting and try it now. Need more info on gameplay? Download the demo.
There is no way to upgrade your suit or your character's attributes. This is not one of those kinds of games. One major beef I have with the AI is that they can see me through the thick vegetation that is all throughout the game, but I can't see them. Yes, there are more of them, but even when I move around, they keep shooting at me perfectly, regardless of how many trees there are between me and them. The only real way to hide in this game when you're close to the enemy is to use the stealth mode. When you so much as throw a grenade at them, the stealth mode is deactivated and you are exposed. I can understand the stealth mode deactivating itself when I open fire, but lobbing a grenade? Shouldn't there be a distinction?
The stealth mode is so incredibly useful when you're floating around in the alien ship. The faster you move, the quicker the stealth mode will expire, so when you remain still, it will last much longer than if you are sprinting. Using the stealth mode, I sneak up to the aliens and get close enough to grab them, then I blast them into smithereens, turn the stealth mode back on and do it again.
All in all, a very good half of a game, but we'll have to wait a while to pick up where this game leaves off. Good gameplay, engaging storyline, outstanding graphics, way too short. It'll be a while before we see a Crysis 2. The big wigs are going to milk Crysis by putting out expansion packs, when they should have just made the complete product and sold it all at once. I guess the days of buying a complete game are over (as are the days of getting gas for 89 cents a gallon).
Incredible but short November 18, 2007
B. Russell (KY)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
In spite of having to run the game on med-low resolution settings I found the game to be excellent. The story flows very well and you never get bored with it. The graphics are excellent, characters are well played for the most part, and the final battle is epic. Even the escort mission (the achillies heal of most games) felt realistic and worked well.
So why 3 stars? I'm taking off .5 because for some reason it won't allow me to map the flight functions to my joystick (wingman extreme). Not that big of a deal since the mouse keyboard does actually work in the game but not very well.
Now for the big hit. I'm taking off 1.5 stars because of the length. I just don't get games these days. They make them with flashy graphics, hopefully a good story, and if it's a really good game it feels epic. However, they make them so short that it just leaves you feeling empty. After the final battle in Crysis I was sitting there waiting for the next section to load when the credits came up. I sat looking confused for a few minutes before I turned the monitor off in disgust.
It's like if they had released Deus Ex and it ended the game after you retrieved the virus or System Shock after you got to the second level of the station or Far Cry after find out about trigens. I brought the game home Friday, played from about 7pm-11pm. Got up the next morning and played from about noon-11PM. I finished the game just after 11PM and I was playing on the hardest difficulty level, took breaks for meals, and ran out to the store to pick up snacks.
It used to be that when you bought a game, you expected to get at least a week of play out of it. Are we now reduced to less than 24 hours? Personally, I'd give up the years worth of work on graphics flash that they spend, for more game time in the story. The multi-player doesn't make up for this either as that's a common excuse.
I loved the game (what little of it there was), but I can't go any higher than 3 stars.
Lackluster November 14, 2007
Spaceman Spiff (Wine Country, CA)
13 out of 48 found this review helpful
I had eagerly anticipated Crysis after Far Cry won my respect.
Sadly, Crysis disappoints.
The game does not cooperate with multi monitor systems, forcing me to operate it in windowed mode in order to play on my favorite monitor (or to totally reconfigure my multimonitor system).
The dialog is unimpressive and rather infantile. The story, from what I have seen of it, is rather uninspiring.
The suit is an annoyance... in every respect. Constantly managing the suit to turn on different superhero powers is just so comicbook. I felt like I was switching between the invisible woman, the hulk, captain america, the flash, and superman. If I wanted a comic book fantasy, I would have spent a few bucks on a... well... a comic book.
The kills are far too difficult and unrealistic. Pumping lead into Koreans point blank, and they just stand there and fire back. Are they all on drugs or something?
The AI has issues: I was spotted creeping in the bushes high on a mountainside, overlooking the waters... by men in a boat, who of course fired on me. First, no way I could have been seen. Next, the AI guys that they fired PAST (eg: they were between me and the firing boat), did not respond to the action.
My system is pretty high performance, not extreme, but no slouch. All settings for Crysis had to be set to low, and even then, I have a crappy frame rate. (Athlon 64 2.41GHz, NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX, 2G Ram, Win XP)
I compare this to Call of Duty 4, also recently released. CoD4 is ASTOUNGING by comparison. Excellent missions, wonderful maps, good story, supreme frame rates on modest hardware (xbox 360).
I think I will try to sell my Crysis SE, and go back to CoD 4
 I'll stick with FarCry December 2, 2007
Mike Sand
13 out of 24 found this review helpful
When you do something right, and then later do something wrong, it demands comparison, and requires criticism.
I love FarCry. It was for me near FPS perfection. For many, it had it's weaknesses, but I have played it through sooo many times, maybe too many. I definitely got my money's worth. Many of us love the FPS "duke nukem" style one against the impossible to beat invasion by "whatever" scenario.
So with such a challenging success in Far Cry, we were really looking forward to Crysis, but with this new one Crytek falls down hard. The big picture planning (plot) was great, but the top dogs should have followed through with the details. Minor examples: all of the voiced parts were weak; the video glitches were extreme; play style was inconsistent and too variable, and the end of the game is downright boooooooring. You finish with a "who cares" attitude.
The download-demo makes you think your getting FarCry "plus". Yea!!! But then with the one you pay for, the plot goes goofy and somebody begins to make this thing into their very poorly scripted "video project". With FarCry you have control over the action; with Crysis you're manipulated at the most inopportune times and to the nth degree and therefore feel depressingly bored. About two thirds of the way through I stopped liking what I was doing, and began feeling like I was playing something by/for girlie-men. So I guess subjectively, the last half of Crysis seemed pointless; in fact, objectively this phase is a huge step ... backward in time ... it reminded me of those old quarter eating "tetris?" video machine games we played in bars in the 70's, now it's just in 3d.
Oh and for you parents who are "real" parents, be warned: The language wasn't feminine: it is ridiculously foul and pointlessly so ... don't even think of allowing your teen to play this with the sound on.
So disappointing! After the first half, it was a huge waste of my time and I'm sure it will be - of your money too. So come-on Crytek, get your act together!
|
|
|
