Crysis Console Review

Whether or not the graphics of Crysis on Xbox 360 hold up against the PC version is not the question whose answer carries the most weight. After all, you already know the answer is that they don’t.

What matters is whether the gameplay is comparable, not only because that’s a resounding yes, but because it’s of far greater potency in how it relates to the Crysis experience.

There’s a secret that Crysis has always held. A secret that’s masked behind the faithfully imagined chickens and the motion blur and the way the sun dapples through the canopy onto the surface-scattered faces of the Korean military elite.

A secret subsumed in the three-grand PC rigs and the vitriolic bajillion frames per second on the all-new mega-ultra-fantastico graphics mod. A simple secret.

That Crysis is one of the finest FPS ever created.

That it’s an overblown tech demo is a preconception we’ve waited a long time to rattle. True, back in 2007, it was our only window into the graphical quality of our gaming future, but Crysis is also a thoughtful, tactical, high-action place where physics, environment, story and AI coalesce to form something unusually perfect.

It’s both a beautiful, physical playground, and a series of objectives injected with just the right dose of urgency. It’s as close to perfect as most FPSs get, and a wake-up call to its console cousins: there isn’t a Call Of Duty this good.

It’s also more than a straight port. Crytek has re-jigged the controls for Xbox 360 to match more closely those of Crysis 2. The Nanosuit has four modes, each of which drain the power bar from the moment they’re activated to the moment it runs out.

Now Crysis 2 players can learn how the two stories combine.

These are Camouflage (invisibility), Shield, Strength (high-jumping and throwing of large objects), and Speed. Camouflage and Shield are mapped to the left and right bumper buttons respectively, while the other two – unlike the PC version in which they had to be manually activated – just go right ahead and drain whatever power is needed whenever an associated action is undertaken, without the need to change ‘mode’.

This means that, unlike its PC counterpart, powers can be used simultaneously. Heavy objects can be lifted, for example, and thrown while camouflaged.

High jumps can be undertaken while shields are still up. It’s a significant improvement to the gameplay – one that has us plan several moves ahead without having to worry about thumb-snapping feats of digital dexterity.

Contrary to popular belief, Crysis is not and never has been an open-world game, though equally, neither is it a corridor shooter. It lays somewhere between the two.

Journeys to missions are undertaken along jungle corridors wide enough to offer the impression of unlimited freedom. There’s just never a time outside of any deliberate attempt to test the limits of our confines that we have cause to notice.

Crytek has found a sweet-spot that very few developers have ever managed – a perfect place between beguiling freedom and logical focus. It doesn’t let us bypass enemy hotspots without either battle or judicious use of stealth, but it does offer enough latitude to tackle each situation as we see fit in terms of direction of approach, range and tactic. It affords us the liberty to stop, think and plan.

Call Of Duty, Homefront and others of their ilk make no such concession. So fixated are they with the linking of one set-piece to the next, they’ve become the gaming equivalent of the worst type of summer Hollywood balderdash – films always in 3D and whose directors spend two and a half hours engaged in the special effects equivalent of striking matches into your eyes.

And now, unlike Crysis 2, you can commandeer vehicles.

There are some minor problems that are obvious to anyone who might have rinsed the PC version. For starters, the AI misbehaves. It gets caught on scenery and on occasion stands about obliviously while we ‘go loud’ on our SCAR or FY-71 assault rifle.

On PC, it’s also possible to save the game at any time. Which is useful, since there are often dozens of armed men between us and our next checkpoint, any one of whom quite capable of ending us.

On PC, we’d take care of a small group, save, then move onto the next, thereby guaranteeing smooth and steady progress. On the Xbox 360, there is no option to save at all, so we’re entirely at the mercy of Crysis’ sparsely sewn checkpoints.

We lose count of the number of times we’re sent back 20 minutes or more. Worse, on several occasions we come close enough to checkpointing at a moment where death is certain, we speculate that in its present state, restarting in an untenable situation is a very real possibility.

Perhaps we could change the difficulty and… oh, wait, we can’t. Whatever difficulty we start the game at, it’s unchangeable until we either finish the game or start again. Food for thought when contemplating taking on Delta Difficulty.

So there are some hangovers from Crysis’ PC origins are somewhat misjudged. We could reduce its score for that, but the efficacy of these annoyances is so slight that really, we’d rather instead show a justified amount of gratitude for finally bringing this to the Xbox 360.

It’s on XBLA for just 1600 MSP when it could have arrived for fifty quid and in its own box to the bat of barely a single eyelid. PC graphics hobbyists may cry victory on witnessing its low-mid spec fidelity, but ultimately, they’re fighting the wrong battle.