Cry More

So, got my hands on the Crysis demo and a computer good enough to run it. I have to say I am pretty impressed. I don't think the game is a big revolution or anything, but it will be a good title.

First off, and this should go without saying, the graphics are amazing. I was able to play the game on all High settings and x8 Anti aliasing. Originaly I had it on x16 but it was artifacting like hell. The lighting, the trees, the people, the guns, all the little details are fucking awesome. One thing I found nifty was when you use a gun sight, the areas around it become blurred as if you were really looking down it. Little stuff like that impresses me. Coming out of the ocean, water drips off the visor of the suit, a nearby grenade explosion will throw dirt onto the display, shooting an enemy up close causes blood to spray, fast running has motion blur, and a ton more. Graphically, the game it set.

The suit is a very cool trick to the game. You get 4 suit abilities, Strength, Speed, Cloaking, and Armour, that you can use at any time, but only one at a time. It runs off an energy bar that you can see above your health on the HUD, and it recharges quickly so you can use it more the once per fight. I really abused the cloaking and strength. It's so fun to run up invisible to an enemy, switch to strength, melee them to death, cloak again, back up, shoot, etc. The speec it pretty cool to. You have a sprint option by default, but when your in speed mode, you run at a sprint normally, and run at an uber speed when you use sprint. I ran through a group of guys, turned around and shot them all in the back with a shotgun. It was really cool. I found the gameplay surprisingly solid. I thought that it was just a pretty FPS until a few videos I saw on Game Trailers two months ago. Good stuff.

My favorite part of the whole game is the environments. The distance you can see things, the interaction, the ability to affect everything. Everything blows up. Everything. You can knock down trees, shoot up houses, toss chickens. It's awesome. I haven't had this much fun shooting and blowing objects up since Red Faction 2. There is a lot of free roaming too. You can take any route you want to get an objective done. The travel distance is impressive also. I was surprised at how much of the level I traveled and how little load time there is. One thing I did see was plant popping. If you have played Oblivion, you know what I am talking about, and it is evident in most games too. It was not as noticeable, but I did see it happening. Oh well, it seems like it's something that's hard to avoid.

I can't wait to see the full game. I hope I can get a computer good enough to play it since I wont be mooching off good college computers for long.