Solid Block of Ise

One of the things that upgrading my computer brought with it was the capability to once again play games. Describing me as a casual gamer is very spot-on, with some weighting on the casual since it’s much rarer to find me gaming these days than before. There’s very few games who catch my interest, and I have a tendency to lose that interest quickly. Ask any of my friends who’s the first one to bail out of multiplayer-games and most of them will point at me.

None the less, I looked forward to being able to try a few of the current games. I have a very loose grasp of what’s current, but I knew that Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 were high up on the list. I also remembered that Bioshock had gotten good reviews and decided to try it as well.

Bioshock was in my opinion very impressive. UT3 is pretty much what could be expected. Crysis on the other hand is without a doubt the biggest disappointment in many years.

Sure, I’ll give praise where praise is due. Visually Crysis is spectacular. The graphics-engine is nothing short of amazing. It will require a quite powerful machine, but if you have one then it will deliver. If you want to impress your friends, Crysis will do nicely. Sound is also pretty good, but it can’t match the visual Wow-factor.

Everything else however, is in my opinion pathetically poor.

The story starts off good enough. In a not too distant future you as a member of an elite search & rescue operation gets sent to a tropical paradise to extract a few archeologists who’ve gotten run over by North Korean army. You discover after a while that something isn’t right, and the archeological dig turns out to be something else. In fact, it turns out to be some kind of alien machine-civilization thingamajig that runs amok and you alone stand between it and the rest of the earth.

The first part of the game is quite cool. Your suit has various neat functions, such as increasing your speed, making you less vulnerable to gunfire, making you stronger or even turning you invisible. Each function has advantages and drawbacks. For example, when in Strong-mode you’re incredibly slow, and in Speed-mode you’re vulnerable to gunfire. When you’re invisible you can’t fire your gun or your cloak will disappear. And so on, and so forth.

Utilizing these functions to outwit and outgun the Korean military is fun. Sneaking around the bushes using a sniper-rifle to pick off targets is fun.

But as soon as the alien crap starts everything that makes the game fun disappears, and instead it mutates into a beautiful but boring twitch-shooter. All the things that made the game impressive in the first part simply become irrelevant. The excellent AI that powers the Korean soldiers disappear, since the aliens will mindlessly attack until you kill them. Whichever mode your suit is in doesn’t matter, and the only thing that matters is how many bullets you can fire at whatever is attacking you. It becomes boring and repetitive, and whatever shred of story exists simply fades into the background.

A good single-player game needs a good story. Fabulous visuals are no compensation for a thin storyline, and Crysis is an excellent example of this. It starts off great, but it doesn’t take long for whatever sanity to completely disappear.

Adding insult to injury it’s ridiculously difficult. I played the game on “Normal” difficulty, and quickly found that I’d have to getting used to trying up to ten-fifteen times before managing something. Some parts of the game are so amazingly difficult that it boggles my mind. Sure, there’s probably tons of Counter-Strike junkies who will get a huge kick out of this, but I’m tired of games who punish my persistence by slapping me in the face all the time. Half-Life 2 was a good example of how difficulty should be set - it provided a challenge, not a chore. After a while Crysis became a chore, it became work. Just plough trough it and maybe it ends some time.

I’m disappointed. I really wanted to like this game. I liked Far Cry, even though it also descended into silliness and provided a half-assed ending. Crysis is even worse. Some things in the story just doesn’t make any sense. Why the hell did Prophet go off on his own, and how the heck did he manage to survive a NUCLEAR MISSILE? The cutscenes become boring after a while, since most of the plot is so amazingly dumb. The gung-ho admiral in charge of the aircraft carrier is a walking cliché. He does something that everyone including the player KNOWS is wrong, and after that the game gets turned into a search-for-the-key-then-defeat-the-end-boss nonsense. The ending itself isn’t an ending. It’s just a cut, while Crytek assembles the addon/sequel. You’re playing the game and then BAM, credits roll.

There’s tons of minor annoyances as well. Why do you get a gun that won’t function until later in the game? There’s no explanation, no nothing. It just doesn’t work until after a certain point, and even then it’s no fun. At this stage Crysis has all the thoughtfulness of an 80’s arcade-shooter. You have to find the “weak points” and finding them simply consists of either shooting wildly or dying. Considering the ludicrous difficulty, the latter is something you’ll do often. Enjoy that quick-load button, you’re gonna get really friendly with it.

No, the first part of the game was fun, and it was fun using the suit and admiring the visuals. After a certain point it just becomes a monotonous shoot-em-up that would make the original Doom seem like a masterfully crafted play.

Bioshock on the other hand was awesome in my opinion. It does everything right that Crysis does wrong, and is equally spectacular in the visuals department since it uses the Unreal3-engine. It’s an entertaining plot, with intrigue and drama and a plot-twist. Add to this the heavy influences of roleplaying that Bioshock has.

So in summary this game is essentially Paris Hilton. It’s pretty to look at and fun to goof off with, but after the first few minutes the prettiness wears off and the conversation becomes stale and monotonous.

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