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Crysis (PC DVD) | 
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| From: Electronic Arts
Category: Video Games
List Price: £34.00
Buy New: £16.80
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New (22) Used (12) from £15.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  101 reviews
Sales Rank: 107
Platform: Windows Xp
Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Media: Video Game
Age: 11 - 18 years
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6
EAN: 5030930052645
ASIN: B000FN5ETO
Release Date: November 16, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New and Fully Guaranteed - Over 90% of orders are dispatched same day or next day by First Class post. Please note Danish customers may incur custom charges.
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Amazon.co.uk Preview
From the makers of Far Cry comes the most technologically advanced video game ever made, with graphics to make you gasp and enemy artificial intelligence so clever it could give SkyNET a run for its money. With Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 now well established, Crysis has become the new milestone for PC graphics and first person shoot `em-ups. The premise of the game involves an alien landing on an island off North Korea, with you as the only person that can stop it. The incredibly realistic looking environments are the game's initial draw, with some particularly stunning looking jungle locales. All the levels include dynamic effects to make them even more realistic (and dangerous) including earthquakes, breaking ice, landslides and tornadoes. Since the alien decides to flash freeze the entire island half way through the game, and the final sections end up in a zero gravity spaceship, it's unlikely you're going to get tired of the same old environments.As in Far Cry, there's no strict level structure and you're able to explore the island however you want; choosing to go in all guns blazing or taking a more stealthy approach. You can also customise your weapons to suit your preferred style of play with silencers, telescopic sights, laser sightings and more. Your special armour can also be modified as you go, so that you make less noise as you move, run faster, jump higher, recover energy or just take damage better and make use of heavier weapons. Naturally the game also includes an extensive multiplayer mode, but it is the stunning, near photorealistic, graphics and game world which is most certain to claim the game's name in PC gaming history.
HARRISON DENT
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| Customer Reviews: Read 96 more reviews...
 Arguably the best FPS ever.... July 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
At the back end of 2007 i owned an ageing PC.I was aware Crysis was generating lots of hype and rave reviews and it provided a ready made excuse for me to upgrade.So you could say i had to spend the best part of 700 in order to play it.Was i dissapointed?Not one bit.I would rate Crysis in the same bracket as Half Life 1/2 and Far Cry (also developed by Crytek).I'll now tell you why.
The nanosuit is an ingenius idea which lets you play the game however you want.If you want to take a cavalier approach you can,but the game is far more rewarding if you adopt the stealth angle and play it mostly in cloak mode.Obviously the objectives will always be the same no matter how many times you play through,but how you achieve these is directly down to you.For example,the 1st KPA soldier you encounter can be pacified with non-lethal ammo,grabbed and thrown into the sea/against a nearby rock,or just shot outright,with or without a silencer.There really is that many ways to go about things.
Weapons can be customised on the fly.Most accomodate a silencer,flashlight,grenade launcher and various scopes.
The vehicles are no less fun to drive than they were in Far Cry and the tank in particular is an absolute joy,although you only get one for a very small portion of the game.
The graphics are a revelation.Never have foliage,water and explosions looked this good.My PC consists of a Geforce 8800 GT,2GB DDR RAM,and a Pentium Core Duo E6750 2.66 GHZ.The game auto detected on high settings for everything and it runs amazingly well,with only the slightest of slowdown in extreme occasions.
The story is very immersive and the level where you take out multiple AA batteries is a classic example of how you can tackle things in your own way.I have done this differently each time i have played through.
The only bad point i feel is worth mentioning is a level near the end when you fly a VTOL.The handling is shocking to say the least,but this level is so brief that it doesn't detract from the game in any way.
The controls also cater for joypad support,but who would want to use one over a mouse and keyboard?Certainly not me.
I would also recommend that any veteran of the FPS genre play the game on Delta difficulty.It purely removes the cross hairs,but doesn't effect scopes on weapons and is eminently manageable.
All in all Crysis is not only a triumph of technology and graphical brilliance,but it is a timely evolution of the first person shooter.It's just a shame that a lot of people will miss out due to not having the required spec machine to play it.My advice to you would be to buy one.I did.And i haven't regretted it for a second...
Solid game, but a short running time and limited freedom weaken its appeal. June 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Back in 2004 a hitherto unknown company called CryTek released a game called Far Cry. In a year that also saw the long-awaited releases of both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, Far Cry was a surprisingly successful break-out hit, marrying the excellent graphics of those games with a semi-freeform approach to missions that was truly exihilirating. The sense of freedom it brought to the normally linear-as-hell first-person shooter market was quite revolutionary, and it has arguably aged better than either of its competitors due to its much greater replay value. Crysis is not the sequel to Far Cry, since Electronic Arts snatched up CryTek and their next game whilst the Far Cry brand name remains with Ubisoft (who are currently developing the Africa-set Far Cry 2 for a late 2008/early 2009 release), but it is the 'spiritual successor'.
Crysis is set in 2020. North Korea has occupied an island in the Pacific Ocean where something unusual has been uncovered by an archaeological expedition. The UN has sent in a team of special operatives using new nanosuit technology to investigate, resulting in guerrila warfare against the North Koreans before the situation escalates and a full-scale war looks set to unfold over the island, resulting in the deployment of two US carrier groups to the area. And then the object the expedition has uncovered wakes up...
So far, so traditional. Crysis builds on the success of its predecessor by retaining the tropical island setting but ramping its graphical capabilities to the max. Make no mistake, Crysis is the single most graphically-advanced computer game on the market, a position it will retain for some years to come given the somewhat conservative looks of its nearest competitors. That said, the game scales excellently: my two-and-a-half-year-old single-core machine coped with most settings at Medium, and it looked substantially better than the still-gorgeous Far Cry with everything turned up to maximum.
Of course, graphical excellence is nothing without the gameplay to back it up and Crysis delivers on that score. It's a fast-paced action game but, like Far Cry before it, it also allows you to play stealthily and gives you more options, such as more silenced weapons and a camouflage field ability, to make use of that tactic. The game also allows for more effective hand-to-hand combat. The nanosuit allows you to increase your speed, strength or armour throughout the game depending on the situation, although to be honest you rarely need to take it off armour mode, but it's a nice touch. Weapons selection is surprisingly poor, however. The UN-issue SCAR rifle is great but you have to ditch it as soon as you run out of ammo and switch to the North Korean automatic rifle, which has the stopping power of a gnat in a hurricane. Entire clips are sometimes needed to take down one enemy soldier. The shotgun is great but ineffective at range, whilst the minigun tears through ammo so fast it's barely worth using. The gauss rifle and the infinite-recharge ice weapon you get at the end of the game are both excellent, but since you only get them five minutes before the game ends, hardly astonishing.
Crysis is a pretty good game that fixes many of the sins of Far Cry. There is less messing around indoors, the story and characters are much better-developed, there's a much greater sense of coherence in how the missions and levels fit together and a solid sense of camaderie once what appears to be the entire US Marine Corps lands on the island to provide some back-up in the latter half of the game. Unfortunately, it also takes some retrograde steps. Whilst multiple routes to mission objectives are again provided, they are much more constrained than before. This is because whilst Far Cry took place across multiple islands, Crysis takes place in sectioned-off areas of one big island, and the game won't let you just wander off at will. This decreased freedom from its predecessor is extremely irritating, given it's one of the appeals of CryTek's work. Secondly, CryTek have astonishingly not yet figured out that whilst we enjoy fighting intelligently-designed human opponents, having lumbering mutants or in this case (spoiler!) ice-based, gravity-bending aliens turn up just feels lame, especially when they can take ten times as much ammo to kill compared to the superhumanly damage-resistant human enemies.
The other major problem, one increasingly prevalent in the FPS genre, is the establishing of Crysis as a franchise. We can't have one good, long game and that's it, we've got to have a major cliffhanger ending, followed by the news that Crysis is a trilogy with part two due in 2009 and part three in 2011, and finally the news that there will be a 'parallel' game following another character through the same events, with the first of these, Crysis: Warhead, coming out in late 2008. Sometimes the sheer avariceness of the computer game industry is startling, especially when the developers proudly tell us that the game has sold a million copies in six months but it could have sold more if piracy wasn't around, so as a result the sequels will be co-developed for the consoles and may not be as visually impressive as a result. And to finally put the boot in, Crysis is quite short: at about eight hours to completion, Crysis is substantially shorter than Far Cry, Half-Life 2, FEAR or a lot of other recent FPS games.
Crysis (***) looks a million dollars even on relatively underpowered machines and is a huge amount of fun to play. However, it won't last very long, has a huge cliffhanger ending and scales back on the amount of freedom you have. The game is available now for PC in the UK and US. The 'parallel' game, Crysis: Warhead, will be released in November 2008, with Crysis II likely to follow a year later.
great game few problems though... June 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I love how this game handles. The special abilities are awsume and the graphics are better than any game i have ever palyed the physics are even better.
On the other hand the online play is impossible to set up. I duno whether its jst my personal exsperience but i cant join any game and i have updated it fully... there is little to no help available surpose ill have to ring up .. never had to do that before.
Another problem im having is that i cant load my saved games... i have a really good computer i think its the game bt i might be wrong still this is not the easiest set up and smooth running game im used to.
I do recomend call of duty4 and this game if these problems are only confinded to my computer.
A Game Of Three Thirds... June 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Played through Crysis twice now.
First a word about the graphics - they are truly amazing, probably the best yet in a PC game, better than Oblivion. However that does come at a price - even with a C2D 6600 and 8800 GT graphics card I couldn't run at full settings, my PSU was screaming like the generator for the electric chair and my (stock) CPU temps were getting uncomfortably close to 70C.
A game of three parts. The first as mentioned previously sees you fighting through the jungle in fairly conventional style against hordes of North Korean militia. Main difference being you have a nanosuit which can be customised to give you maximum stealth, strength, armour etc. In practice, most of the time you will only be using the stealth and armour options. The enemy AI is pretty good and at times you can get a bit overwhelmed by the numbers as you fight through the levels. Cloaking is not always an option and as mentioned in other reviews, ammunition can be hard to find - particularly on later levels when you encounter frequent tanks and helicopter gunships. In fact the allied weapons you start out with are pretty much useless as the only weapons/ammo you find are those from fallen enemies, so you end up using those most of the time.
Second part is the infamous alien ship. Essentially float around a series of psychedlic tubes with no map trying random corridors to find the exit. Weird floaty aliens periodically attack which can be a problem as apart from a couple of areas there's no ammo to speak of.
Once you find your way back to the world, the Korean enemy has been vanquished into a frozen waste and the enemy is now various incarnations of the aliens. Various challenges face you as you now have to retreat the island and get back to the aircraft carrier. Some of these are absurdly difficult, such as the one where you have to keep your comrade warm and this one took some doing. The VTOL aircraft you fly handles worse than the planes in GTA. If you follow the game cues you will end up dying. Over and over. Discretion was the better part of valour here as I made a run for it. Back on the ship, you end up fighting more aliens including the final boss. Some have commented this was easy - I actually found this quite challenging, partly due to the huge demand placed on the hardware by the fast moving graphics and the same lack of ammunition which plagues the rest of the game.
I'll probably revisit Crysis again later in the year but after going through twice I have no immediate urge to repeat straight off. The game has some bugs, notably mission triggers failing to operate leaving you to play through a whole level from beginning again. Most of the time you are the lone soldier even when faced with overwhelming odds (such as attacking the mine) whereas COD2 and COD4 most of the time you have comrades supporting you. A useful feature (essential, really) is that you can autosave the game at any point, unlike the checkpoints of COD or the safehouses of GTA.
Would certainly recommend if you like an intensive action shooter that requires a bit of strategic thinking. Just be prepared for some frustrations and that your hardware will get a workout like never before!
Hard to understand the negative reviews June 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have to agree with the reviewers who have expressed puzzlement at all the negative reviews flying around about Crysis. It's a seriously good game. Here's a summary of my experience.
Firstly, I'm playing on Windows XP on an Intel Core2Duo 6600 with an 8800GT graphics card and 2GB RAM. A PC bought for about 600 almost two years ago, but with an upgraded graphics card that cost me 130 in March. I'm also using the tweak that can readily be found on the internet to unlock the "very high" graphics settings that are supposedly Windows Vista only. Everything runs perfectly, with zero lag, and the graphics surpass anything I've seen before in a game. Even my Dad, who has zero interest in computers and thinks games are a waste of time (he's probably right, sigh) found himself getting into my run through the Relic level - he admitted it really did feel like he was watching a film. His advice on how to tackle the hilltop fort wasn't up to much, though....
I've no doubt it won't be half as impressive on older machines (or on Vista with my specs, it would seem) BUT don't forget that as technology moves on, Crysis will become more and more playable for lower cost. The sweet spot when average PCs can run it on high settings and it still looks top notch in comparison to other games will likely not come along for a few months. Right now it's probably only fully appreciated by very keen gamers who are willing to drop three-figure sums on upgrading their computers (sad types like me, then). If you are one of these people, though, you'll surely agree that Crysis is the pinnacle of what any format can currently boast in terms of visuals.
In terms of game mechanics, I've also found none of the problems that many people have grumbled about. For instance, no problems with sniping enemies at very long range - in fact, it's so realistic you can even shoot their helmets off, then follow-up with the head shot. It does seem to be the case that it's slightly easier to take enemies down if they aren't aware of you, but then they tend to be moving around a lot more so it could just be me imagining things.
In play it's not quite as free-roaming as, say, Stalker, but considerably less linear than the likes of HL2 or FEAR. You are guided from point to point, but there are plenty of different ways to deal with each challenge, from the quiet and stealthy to the "guns blazing", or even taking a nice swim past all the trouble... Of course it's much more fun to try to take out everything ahead of you. This, to me, is what sandbox gaming is about and it works nicely.
Until....yes, the alien levels and onwards left me a bit cold, as they clearly have for many others. For me, it was more that they just didn't live up to what had gone before. I'd (deliberately) spent ages working my way carefully through the jungles, past the checkpoints, forts, rivers, ruins etc. having a terrific time, but then suddenly it changed. Less fun, but still a cut above most - one star deducted.
Lastly, the length. As mentioned above, it is possible to race through Crysis at breakneck speeds and complete it very quickly. It's certainly a lot shorter than Far Cry and many other FPS games, but I'd recommend cranking up the difficulty and taking your time. Half the fun for me is hiding under bushes spotting how troops are moving, planning an assault, then executing. I also quite liked re-playing sections to find new and interesting approach paths (like the "through the waterfall" hidden route to get into the town in Recovery).
There's basically so much to admire and enjoy here. An immersive, engrossing, beautiful and technically peerless game, Crysis deserves the support of the PC community. I've heard that Crytek may not develop on a PC-only basis in the future, due to modest sales (and the spectre of file shar piracy) - although I hope this won't apply to the rumoured sequels to Crysis that complete the story. In any event this would be a great shame, as their cutting-edge skills are best suited to programming for the PC. As a format, the constantly evolving hardware puts it at the forefront of gaming technology.
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