Crysis – Why graphics aren’t everything

Nobody would ever complain that Crysis doesn’t look nice enough. Christ, the game came out in 2007, and only now does anyone even possess a system with enough horsepower to run it with all of the graphics options cranked. My computer isn’t state of the art (Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz processor, NVidia GeForce 8800GTS 512 graphics card, 4 GB 1066 MHz DDR2 memory), but back then it would have been up there…and I have half the settings dropped to Medium. Even with that, persistent memory leak problems mean that the longer I play, the more the animation engine starts to chug.

And that complete lack of optimization for its time is part of the issue with this game…it’s really pretty, but it possesses the intelligence of a can of beer. On top of that, broken ‘features’ and issues that were never resolved are splattered all over this mess. It’s like the hot girl with no personality…there’s no reason to stick around.

Normally I don’t notice ragdoll physics (basically, objects and bodies reacting to being hit/shot/pushed in a somewhat realistic manner) in a game. I noticed them here because they’re absurd. Bodies seem to become weightless in a weird way, as though a whole different set of physics apply to them now that they’re no longer living. They sort of float around the space they are occupying, until typically getting stuck in the terrain in one of thousands of clipping glitches you’ll encounter. It’s so awesome when stealthily moving through a base is ruined by an enemy’s gun getting ‘stuck’ in the floor and proceeding to rattle around like a garbage bin being smashed by a baseball bat. What’s even worse about these problems is that this stuff worked in FEAR, and that game came out 2 years before this did.

And good lord are those enemy soldiers fucking stupid. Guys walking around in heavy armour, wielding chain guns…but you keep shooting them in the back of the head from a distance and they keep looking the other way. Hey moron, the bullets are hitting THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD! Maybe turn around!! It’s like engaging in a battle to the death with The Three Stooges long after they’ve beaten and abused each other in to a state of drooling retardation.

And as you play through the cliche story (You and your unit of super troopers in nano suits drop on an island swarming with North Koreans to rescue a science team, only something alien is involved as well…), it’s just one stupid scene after another of stupid enemies doing stupid things in a stupid manner. Even the big game play ‘gimmick’ of the nano suits just isn’t very interesting. You can switch between 4 modes…Strength, Shielding, Speed or Stealth. But you only have a finite pool of energy that must be allowed to recharge. The problem is that the energy charges back up so quickly that it really doesn’t ever force you in to a tough spot, or even to switch up tactics that much.

Crytek had the gall to complain about poor sales for this shit show, blaming it entirely on piracy. Gee guys…you made a game that couldn’t run worth a damn on 95% of computers on the market when this was published. Making matters worse, it was so horribly optimized at launch that it didn’t run well on the PC’s that supposedly could handle it anyway. And when people finally do crack in to the game, they encounter a bug riddled disaster because you professional graphics whores couldn’t be bothered to work on anything but the shinies. Can’t BELIEVE such a Tour de Force of broken potential didn’t sell huge!

This game is everything that’s wrong with the gaming industry. Half baked gimmicks and an over-emphasis on graphics creating nothing but a generic collection of partially realized potential and head-shakingly stupid bugs. I’ve mocked ArmA II in the past, but at least they’re trying to create something new and worthwhile, and it runs in to issues with AI because they’ve tried to do too much. These guys are running in to issues with AI because they couldn’t be bothered to actually program a game…it’s a glorified tech demo for your graphics card. And yet this disaster received massive reviews, scoring an average of 91/100 on Metacritic. It’s just another indication that so called ‘professional’ game reviewers frequently don’t get past how nice things look as they run around doing their “Pew Pew!” thing through a level of mongoloid error merchants.

I’m told that Crysis Warhead is much better done, and I do own it as part of my purchase of the Maximum Edition. However, I just don’t think I care. This debacle has soured me on the entire franchise, so that I could give a damn about the upcoming sequel too. I have no doubt it will consist of more of the same…really shiny characters doing unbelievably stupid things. I don’t care. And if that really is the direction this clueless collection of programmers has yet again gone, I sincerely hope it puts them out of business. We don’t need more piles of fecal matter like this cluttering the market.

Ladies and gentlemen…a rare game that I flat out regret purchasing. What a waste of the 10 or so hours it took me to just give up and uninstall this dreck. Good riddance, Crysis. You are one of the most utterly pointless AAA games that I have ever spent time with.