I've played the Crysis demo now thanks to Yahtzee. I really enjoyed the sneaking around part... a lot. The combat might be crap, I wouldn't know yet. The game ran brilliantly on my cobbled together machine with medium settings and just as well as with textures and objects bumped to high. I was really surprised how smoothly it ran. I'd really look forward to play it on some DX10 high dollar rig. The controls are both rich in number but not obscure or convoluted enough to be troublesome. Thank god this isn't another 3-button console-game. If I've fully adapted to the game after 30 minutes then some thing's wrong. The weapon customization menu is done almost as God himself would code.
The most fun part of FarCry was infiltrating the island, basically the first mission and it subsequently got less fun from there and I assume Crysis will be the same once I'm fighting neon supermutants and blowing through rich detailed terrain and shooting randomly in complete disregard to the delicate and rich gameplay from hour one.
The story is rather linear and contrived but at least the mission design doesn't force you to do things TOO rigidly. Never so far has my cover been intentionally blown in a cut scene or if I have two objectives I can go to whichever first I want. It's not Armed Assault freedom, but they could've made it worse.
I very much enjoy that the UI is finally starting to be toned down in games. If I want to aim my gun I want to use the ironsights. The hardest difficulty setting is the ONLY way to play this. It's a shame that I have to choose enemy difficulty in the same click as realism options. "Oh you want Koreans to speak Korean? No crosshairs... yeah now the enemies can withstand 3 headshots." I like realism and difficulty that doesn't necessitate making the enemies stronger. MoH:Airborne I'm looking at you...grrr. I also noticed the finger on trigger guy in the opening cutscene. That kind of stuff breaks immersion for me. The more you learn about proper military from factual sources instead of games/movies the more you really respect their abilities.
Unfortunately, the best part of the game, what it looked like the game was perfect for, cooperative gaming on a 2-4 player scale is... not there. Community addons are going to be very stupid "Shoot all the AI types" and I have to say I'm very disappointed. Single player and adversarial multiplayer are minuscule in comparison to the joy that good cooperative gaming accrues.
Yahtzee is right, making Crysis into a exploration game that showed off the engine would be proper use of this game. Your AI and story events scripts would have to be smarter, maybe, but it'd be both it. I'm so tired of the on-rails shooter... CoD4... don't make me laugh.
