Crysis of Faith

Seems somewhat inappropriate to start the first post off both, a) short, and b) angry.

Crysis had me hooked from the first moment for the same reason people believe in God - ya don't really know why, ya just do. Anyone who's played Crysis can probably say the same of it.

There are a lot of games that lay claim to being a "thinking man's shooter". BioShock was just one of them. Yes, it was deeper than the Gears that plague the market, but on a philosophical level. It didn't really require much thought - the Pipedream hacking mini-game, perhaps, but that's no more a thinking game than the maze on a Hungry Jack's placemat - beyond "Put the bullet in the other guy". There was some environment interaction, to an extent, if you were lucky enough to have a Splicer standing in water whilst you had your Electro Bolt Plasmid active (an event which only occurs in the tutorial level of BioShock and in any deus ex machina moment of Die Hard/James Bond flick). But a thinking man's game? I don't know. Depends if "Wood + Flames = burning" is the sort of thing that you need to think about.

No, Crysis had you actually thinking, if you played it on Delta difficulty.

The hostiles spoke in Korean, so there was no queue as to their plots. They actively searched you out, moving in a team - one man at the back covering, two of them moving together. You pissed off an attack chopper, you better believe that thing would be riding your Hind (heh) until it cut you down.

What made it more a thinking man's game than previous was because you had to think if you wanted to progress. Get caught in the open with your energy meter down, you had better make peace with God, and fast. How far was that rock? Could your 30% energy meter last long enough, or would you have to get down and risk a recharge?

How many Koreans got out of that humvee? Three? Four? Too often, the game would laugh maniacally at my flaws. It wasn't afraid to point, laugh, and say "Four, you idiot, that last guy was moving around the flank!" Smacking you over the head Gibbsishly and grinning with smug self-satisfaction. So you'd hit quick-load and remember, this time, that there were four of the buggers roaming around.

..and then there were the moments when it didn't require planning, when you were one with the Nanosuit, where the game was almost an organic extension of your very soul. A silent pistol shot, flicking to stealth quickly, stalking around the rock to dispatch two more... and even when it all went to hell, when a dozen rifles pointed at you, it was the frantic emergency of a rear-guard action; picking off one, two, three, then sprinting to the next best patch of cover.

I missed the Crysis boat. The myth that only the seven most powerful computers in the world could run the game would easily deter someone using a low-end machine (obviously a ridiculous notion, since the game would have to at least be able to run on the thirty PCs run over at the Crytek offices). When I get a better rig a year ago, the game had fallen so far off the radar that it was a burp on sonar.

..which makes it strange, then, that I missed the criticism. You'd think a jarring comment like "Jumps the freakin' shark" would be noticed. Not so. It's nostalgic, in a way, and I thank Crytek for it; I missed out on Far Cry, too, and picked it up late. Both Far Cry and Crysis were great games, real open-world games that offered freedoms outside the corridor of the First-Person Shooter. And both, it seems, jump the shark.

You know it. One second, Koreans! Mercenaries! Awesome firefights, pitched battles. The next moment... Aliens? Mutated beasts? What the hell? Did I fall out of Crysis and land in a rejected Uwe Boll script??

Does that man even use scripts??

The point I'm at is a rapid change of pace. They give you a dot on a map and say "See that? Get there. Have fun. Dinner's at 6." When you jump the shark - trust me, the landing is rough and jolting, you'll know it - that freedom is gone. It's the only way to be lost with direction. When you enter the.. shark-jumping arena, well, you don't even have the direction. You're simply Lost.

I'm sick of zero-G.
I'm sick of Kit Fisto.

Let me back outside! Don't let Crysis end in this realm of freaky, insane, repetitively disorienting passages.