So I started playing Crysis 1 again...

[Morgoth780]

And I'm remembering why I loved this game so much and why it's so much better than 2 and 3. I really wish more first person shooters would do what it did.

Having to manually pick up ammo with your hand is one of the most immersive aspects. In Warhead, I remember picking hard difficulty (i think) since this feature was removed on the easier difficulties.

The open maps are great. I love being able to maneuver through the island however I like. Probably similar to Far Cry, but I've never played it (and probably never will seeing the BS they pulled with my copy of Far Cry 3).

The suit modes are a lot better than in 2 or 3. Aside from just how they're designed (being able to spring without using suit energy, for example), being able to select each mode individually is great, especially since it results in other slight buffs (speed mode decreases reload time, for example). I do think holding the melee button or holding the jump button to use the amplified suit version is something 2 did well. I think it would have been better to do something similar with sprint though, as it's really frustrating using suit energy every time I want to spring.

Even one of the most major complaints about the first Crysis, that being how difficult it is when the aliens show up, I'm sure I won't mind. I didn't mind it on my first playthrough, I still had fun. I will admit it's flawed though, as the difficulty spike is severe.

I also like switching attachments on the fly. I really wish more campaigns would let you do that, especially since I don't want to use a suppressor *all* the time. I also like the inventory, although it's perhaps a bit redundant being able to carry two assault rifles.

Basically, my only real complaints other than the difficulty spike is the story, which is sufficient but nothing exceptional, at least in my opinion.

And for a 2007 game running on medium settings, it looks pretty incredible. I think it still looks good enough to be released this year, just maybe not top tier AAA. I will say that the rock textures are pretty awful, but maybe they're better on ultra. I don't remember for sure.

So... anyone else a huge Crysis 1 fanboy/girl? I like all of them, but 1 and warhead are definitely the best after revisiting them for the first time.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I love Crysis 1 and Warhead. A lot of people dismissed that game as just a game with good graphics. Like it can't have good gameplay. But it does. Crysis literally has most things that gamers want out of a modern shooter, so dismissing it as a dumb shooter is quite frankly dishonest rambling of a hater. I understand the criticism towards later parts of the game when aliens show up, but I enjoyed those parts as well.

Crysis 2 and 3 suffered from obvious dumbing down for consoles. And yes, that's the correct word to use. The game wasn't streamlined. It wasn't finely tuned and modernized. It was dumbed down. It was turned into something that resembles CoD in almost every aspect. Don't even get me started on abandoning the cliffhanger at the end of Crysis. That was infuriating. But I've lost all respect for Crytek by now. I don't even care about their financial troubles. In fact, I hope they go bankrupt and Flying Wild Hog buys the rights to Crysis IP. But that's just my fantasy.

As for the graphics, on ultra settings the game looks good enough even for today's standards. In fact, I'm not sure that current consoles could run original Crysis at 1080p/60fps on ultra settings.

 

[The Madman]

It really annoyed me that when Crysis was first released it was overlooked or dismissed by so many people as being just a tech demo game and little more. It wasn't, Crysis was genuinely one of the best games released that year and continues to remain a damned solid fps even years later.

Had some great mods too. I miss Mechwarrior: Living Legends, it was one of the best total conversion mods I've ever played and I must have put dozens of hours into the multiplayer for that.


Shame the Crysis sequels failed to like up to the original games ambitions and seemingly feel into the trap of actually becoming the 'tech demo' game that the original was sometimes dismissed as. Not that they're bad from what I've played of them, but there's no denying they lack the grand ambitions of the original game.

 

[shrekfan246]

I love Crysis 1 and Warhead. A lot of people dismissed that game as just a game with good graphics. Like that means it can't have good gameplay. And it does. Crysis literally has most things that gamers want out of a modern shooter, so dismissing it as a dumb shooter is quite frankly dishonest rambling of a hater. I understand the criticism towards later parts of the game when aliens show up, but I enjoyed those parts as well.

Crysis 2 and 3 suffered from obvious dumbing down for consoles. And yes, that's the correct word to use. The game wasn't streamlined. It wasn't finely tuned and modernized. It was dumbed down. It was turned into something that resembles CoD in almost every aspect.

Okay, I'll bite.

You want to know why I like Crysis 2 and 3 far more than 1 or Warhead?

Because they're more functional as actual games.

By which I mean, sure, the gunplay of Crysis is good. The variety of weapons and firing modes is really awesome, the variety in how suit functions change the gameplay is awesome, even the variety in enemies isn't that bad. But what really lets it down is the AI, the actual combat and the suit power drain, and the pointlessness of the world they created.

You want to play Crysis like a stealth game? Fuck you, the cloak wears off after one shot, two if you've got a sound suppressor and have toggled single-fire mode. Also, good luck ever getting around the map while cloaked because if you're not crouched or prone then your cloak wears off after about five seconds. Oh yeah, and just to put the cherry on top, we spawn in enemies out of the ether whenever enemies are alerted to your presence. Oh, so hearing that makes you want to go into encounters guns blazing? Fuck you, the armor mode is just the regular health meter from any other first-person shooter, so you'd damn well better be hiding behind cover. Oh yeah, and all of these guys in regular military fatigues can take just the same amount of shots as you if you don't hit them in the head. And if you're incredibly unlucky then getting a headshot won't even kill them in one shot. Oh yeah, and Speed and Power modes are basically useless outside of trying to get around these massive empty maps we've made that have nothing to do in them except for going to the next objective. Oh, and I hope you really love the gorram FY71, because it's the only assault rifle you're going to get any ammo for. Also, good luck with taking out any tanks; you'd best hope you stocked up on RPG ammo. Oh, wait, you can't get more than a few shots per rocket launcher! Hahaha!

Obviously I'm being exaggeratedly abrasive, and I don't want you to take any of that as anything more than overblown and exasperated snark. But Crysis is another one of those games I've tried to go through multiple times and I can just never get through it, while I've played through Crysis 2 twice (once on a higher difficulty, which is pretty rare for me to do) and I finished Crysis 3 pretty much within a week or two after it was released.

I've got nothing against difficult games or even unfair games, but to me Crysis just seems poorly balanced.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

All of those flaws you mentioned are easily fixed via in-game console. You can even set up an autoexec.cfg to give you more suit energy or just have it deplete a lot slower than usual, as well as any ammo you need with a press of a button.

 

[shrekfan246]

All of those flaws you mentioned are easily fixed via in-game console. You can even set up an autoexec.cfg to give you more suit energy or just have it deplete a lot slower than usual, as well as any ammo you need with a press of a button.

I'll give Crysis credit for being perhaps the most heavily moddable and tweak-friendly first-person shooter I've ever seen, but I haven't beaten a game via cheating in about eight years. XD

I don't necessarily think it's a bad game, mind, but I do think 2 and 3 get an unfairly bad wrap because they dramatically simplified the scope of the franchise and made everything a bit more easy-mode. And went completely wacko with the narrative, but frankly I consider the gameplay in all of the Crysis games to be far better than the story in the first place.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I'll give Crysis credit for being perhaps the most heavily moddable and tweak-friendly first-person shooter I've ever seen, but I haven't beaten a game via cheating in about eight years. XD

You're looking at it the wrong way. You'd just be tweaking the game to be more fun in a single player mode. There's nothing wrong with that. A lot of games have mods that tweak gameplay to make them more fun in some way. If you think that suit energy and lack of ammo for certain weapons is a design flaw, you have tools that Crytek gave you to remedy those problems. So don't look at it like cheating. Go play Crysis and have fun playing it the way you want to.

 

[shrekfan246]

I'll give Crysis credit for being perhaps the most heavily moddable and tweak-friendly first-person shooter I've ever seen, but I haven't beaten a game via cheating in about eight years. XD

You're looking at it the wrong way. You'd just be tweaking the game to be more fun in a single player mode. There's nothing wrong with that. A lot of games have mods that tweak gameplay to make them more fun in some way. If you think that suit energy and lack of ammo for certain weapons is a design flaw, you have tools that Crytek gave you to remedy those problems. So don't look at it like cheating. Go play Crysis and have fun playing it the way you want to.

That's true enough, but I still feel a little weird about doing that kind of stuff whenever I haven't "legitimately" beaten a game first. I think it's a subconscious thing that I got because when I was younger, the only way I did beat most of my PC games was through giving myself an obscene advantage.

But hey, I own the game anyway and I'm generally a pretty persistent bastard, so it's not like I won't ever give it another bash in the future.

 

[Buffoon1980]

Yes, OP, I pretty much agree. I think Crysis is one of the most underrated FPS's out there. For me the best thing about it was just the way the suit powers worked together to make the gameplay more adaptive and dynamic, especially in multiplayer. Also, Warhead was a fantastic expansion that added a lot.

Regarding the aliens, I didn't find them all that more difficult (probably because I was playing on easy, I really suck) but I did find them just less interesting as enemies, so that was a downside for me.

I thought that Crysis 2 was good but not truly great, but I have to say that I also thought Crysis 3 was somewhat underrated. There are some great moments in that game. The narrative is pretty damn stupid, but as a game I still think it's great.

 

[RejjeN]

You want to play Crysis like a stealth game? Fuck you, the cloak wears off after one shot, two if you've got a sound suppressor and have toggled single-fire mode.

Just wanted to respond to this part in particular. I myself got into the habit of manually switching off the cloak before taking the shot, then immediately re-cloaking and moving behind bushes/lying down in tall grass/behind a wall to let it recharge. Worked wonders on the hardest difficulty where you are supposed to be super vulnerable (Normal felt pretty viable for a guns blazing way of playing to my memory, but it's been a while).

Great game, personally loved the way the game changed with the introduction of the aliens, especially the alien ship and flash-freeze parts of the game. And the Gauss Rifle is just <3

 

[Zhukov]

I thought it was tripe.

The balance is beyond pathetic. All the suit powers just feel like I'm playing a game with cheat codes on.

After a while I just started cloaking and sprinting past everything. Works on max difficulty too. Why bother with a shootout when I can run across the level in a few seconds and turn invisible whenever?

The AI was terrible too. This is a game where you can snipe an enemy super soldier in the head and he won't even react.

People make a fuss about the open levels, but they mostly just amounted to a lot of empty space with some trees. No need to interact or explore and nothing to find or interact with even if you do decide to look around.

Story is standard military waffle. You shoot the enemies of 'Murica, then some aliens show up so you shoot them too. Literally nothing more to it.

Even graphically I was unimpressed. I'm sure the visuals are all very cool from a tech standpoint, but the visual design is boring. I'd rather look at something like Bioshock, released in the same year.

Warhead was more of the same with literally some of the worst writing I've ever encountered in a game. It remains the one and only game where I resorted to skipping cutscenes before even watching them once.

The sequels had their problems, they still suffered from the cloak-past-everything balance problem for example, but at least they had some decent pacing and level design.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I felt like Crysis was a graphical and tech demo but the game itself was a reskin of Farcry. I didn't hate it, just felt like it was less of a game and more of a bragging right for uber-PC geeks who wanted to show off their mighty deep pockets... well that feeling came from knowing people who did pretty much just that.
Poor writing and pacing. It wasn't boring, but it wasn't a marvel of awesome gaming and wouldn't make it into my top 20.

 

[MysticSlayer]

It was turned into something that resembles CoD in almost every aspect.

While there was a clear CoD influence on Crysis 2, I wouldn't say that the series went all-out Call of Duty. I love most of the Call of Duty games up through MW2 (and have even played through MW3), and what appealed to me in Crysis 2 was far different than how Call of Duty appealed to me. It had a clear linear direction, yes, but it still gave a relative level of freedom within those constraints. I could play it more like a stealth game (something unheard of in CoD), and even if I did go in guns blazing, the firefights tended to play out more like the original Crysis than Call of Duty. Yeah, there were some sections that were ripped straight from MW2, but outside of that 1-2 hour span, the game felt more like it was trying to get various stealth action and FPS titles to meet together with Call of Duty simply being one of the FPS titles in that mix.

 

[EmperorZinyak]

Crysis was good, but I liked 2 a whole lot better. The environments in Crysis 2 were fairly large, with lots of flanking routes and interesting locations, compared to the large but bare environments of Crysis 1. The enemies were also cooler in Crysis 2. The new Ceph were great at using the environment, jumping around, running on walls, and flanking effectively. And surprisingly, Crysis 2 runs better than Crysis 1. My mid-end machine struggled with Crysis 1, but runs Crysis 2 on the second-highest graphics settings at 60 fps. I feel like Crysis was a little sloppily put together compared to the tight, focused experience of Crysis 2. The battle scenes near the finale of Crysis 2 were some of the best and atmospheric I've ever seen in a game.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well I also loved it at the time, but then as I described it back to people I realized the parts that were great came down to the engine. Everything else content wise was average, but pretty looking.

I guess for the Halo/CoD generation this series must look like it has descended from heaven itself, but again I played shooters before that and Crysis even with it's improvements on the simplistic FPS formula is still severely lacking.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

I dislike how Crysis 2 is considered a "CoD clone" when it doesn't resemble Call of Duty in any meaningful way, unless you count Advanced Warfare.

>Bullet sponge enemies with advanced AI.
>Open urban levels with very little "you didn't keep up - you're dead".
>Plus the... almost total lack of resemblance to CoD.

Then there's Crysis 3, which returned to more open environments, yet C1 fanbois still weren't happy.

You want an example of an FPS series which was actually dumbed down?

Far Cry. First Ubisoft turned Crytek's Far Cry into the super linear, yet somewhat decent, Far Cry: Instincts. Then they progressively turned Far Cry into an FPS Assassin's Creed collectathon with Far Cry 2, 3, and 4.

Crysis 2 and 3 still play more or less like Crysis. The biggest difference is a change in setting. But, to be fair, C2 and C3 are quite determined to nerf the nanosuit. The games do it both mechanically and narratively. In C2, your nanosuit fails repeatedly. In C3, your nanosuit makes you vulnerable to Alpha Ceph influence. Crysis 3's dramatic climax in space emphasises the relative unimportance of the nanosuits.

edit:
Also, what's with the revisionism when it comes to Far Cry and Crysis? Neither game was actually "open". You want an "open" FPS where you run around shooting trees in half? Try something like Delta Force. Crysis, like Far Cry, was a series of open areas connected by strictly linear segments. Far Cry had one or two levels which were indeed quite "open", though, to be fair. But a majority are just disguised corridors.

 

[RicoADF]

All of those flaws you mentioned are easily fixed via in-game console. You can even set up an autoexec.cfg to give you more suit energy or just have it deplete a lot slower than usual, as well as any ammo you need with a press of a button.

I'll give Crysis credit for being perhaps the most heavily moddable and tweak-friendly first-person shooter I've ever seen, but I haven't beaten a game via cheating in about eight years. XD

I don't necessarily think it's a bad game, mind, but I do think 2 and 3 get an unfairly bad wrap because they dramatically simplified the scope of the franchise and made everything a bit more easy-mode. And went completely wacko with the narrative, but frankly I consider the gameplay in all of the Crysis games to be far better than the story in the first place.

I'd say the ArmA series is more moddable and tweak friendly.
Still I agree that I prefer to finish games without mods first, that said I finished Crysis years ago. Found it quite fun although the best thing was that the Aliens were actual aliens for once and not humans in a rubber suit. Sadly Crysis 2 and 3 abandoned them for boring designs.

 

[Asclepion]

So the Ceph obliterate the human race, right?

The series doesn't do some kind of stupid "This is the leader Ceph, if you kill it all of the other ones die" Deus Ex Machina, right?

 

[Ambient_Malice]

So the Ceph exterminate the human race, right?

The series doesn't do some kind of stupid "This is the leader Ceph, if you kill it all of the other ones die" Deus Ex Machina, right?

The Ceph open a massive rift in space. Prophet-slash-Alcatraz uses an orbital superweapon originally intended to destroy cities on earth to blow the crap out of the ship emerging from the rift.

As for the "human race", the whole point of Crysis 2-3 is that you're not human anymore. By Crysis 3, you're not even ALIVE anymore. You're the corpse of Alcatraz inside Prophet's nanosuit. You are kinda-sorta "Prophet", but Prophet died at the beginning of Crysis 2.

The human race can't stop the Ceph. But neither can a transhuman warrior. It's a somewhat pretentious mix of abandoning one's humanity to become a superior warrior but also remembering what makes one human providing the motivation to reach beyond the limits the post-human entity called "Prophet".

Destroying the Alpha Ceph kills the normal Ceph directly tied to it, but does zero to stop the invasion. (Also, for part of Crysis 3, the Ceph think you're the Alpha Ceph.)

 

[fix-the-spade]

You want to play Crysis like a stealth game? Fuck you, the cloak wears off after one shot, two if you've got a sound suppressor and have toggled single-fire mode. Also, good luck ever getting around the map while cloaked because if you're not crouched or prone then your cloak wears off after about five seconds. Oh yeah, and just to put the cherry on top, we spawn in enemies out of the ether whenever enemies are alerted to your presence.

At the risk of being rude, that says more about your patience than the game's willingness to let you play stealth. I played through a couple of sections of the game without firing a single shot (one being from Dr Rosenthal's death up to the extraction point where you first encounter NK Nano troopers, at which point you have to stand and fight), it's completely possible to play full stealth but the AI are a lot less forgiving about spotting than in many true stealth games.

The series doesn't do some kind of stupid "This is the leader Ceph, if you kill it all of the other ones die" Deus Ex Machina, right?

In the first game the Ceph's intentions are left completely ambiguous (they aren't even given a name), in two and three they run on exactly that trope, which kind of embodies 2/3's enormous dumbing down.

Crysis with a couple of high res texture mods is still a world beater for graphics too... mmm high res textures.