We recall the virtues of one of the most important shooters in history, a technical portent that also offered a lot at a playable level.
If we look back to 2007, we discover one of the best years for the first person shooter: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Halo 3, The Darkness, Bioshock and our protagonist, Crysis. The Crytek game, relaunched a few years ago for last generation consoles – it was exclusive to PC until then – will be remastered and released once again for current hardware, including Nintendo Switch, this summer, and it is a perfect occasion to (re) discover one of the shooters that made history. This was for various reasons, mainly playable but above all technical, which we will see in detail below.
Nowadays, playing shooters on open stages (Far Cry, Borderlands) is a common thing today, but back then it wasn't so much. Let's notice in fact that the one that gave the most options in that sense is precisely Crysis, in which we toured an entire island in which history takes place, and whose environments we could use to our advantage to carry out our objective. In this title we put ourselves in the shoes of Nomad, a member of the US Special Forces who goes along with several comrades to discover that something related to alien artifacts has happened and that the Koreans are probably ahead of the investigation. But it will not do it to bare chest, rather the opposite.
One of the main attractions of Crysis was the freedom to face every situation, something that as we said, today we take it for granted, but in 2007 it was a novelty and almost a luxury. The nanosuit with which Nomad was equipped gave him a multitude of possibilities such as armor, invisibility, and other abilities to face each mission in the way that we preferred, missions that, incidentally, already offered a variety of situations. Still, the lovers of confrontations and shooting had to be in luck, because without going into storyline spoilers, in the final stretch of the game Crysis became a little more linear for a more direct plot conclusion.
It is expected that the version we receive this summer on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch is the same one that appeared in the last generation, yes, with the pertinent graphic improvements. That is, a campaign that going fast can take us about 6 hours (8 or 9 more calmly), but no sign of the standalone expansion Crysis Warhead, starring Psycho, which in the base game plays a secondary role, or the multiplayer competitive, although it is fair to say that this online mode would not contribute much at present. Of course, we shouldn't expect the level editor, either.
Power ahead of its time
Another reason why Crysis is special is that it was then a technical benchmark, to the point that even high-end equipment could not show it in all its glory. It would take a few years for the game to run on most compatible ones, and it still wasn't a guarantee. To give us an idea, the version for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, released 4 years later, looked spectacular even with obvious technical cuts: saw teeth, textures that did not shine in the same way (grass, water), a distance minor draw, some drop in the frame rate …, but still, it was a more than worthy conversion for the limitations of both consoles with respect to the PC.
Of course, it should be noted that Crytek's experience with the Cry Engine even improved some aspects such as lighting, resulting in wonderful scenes on the island during daylight hours, but it came out worse in other aspects. The enemy artificial intelligence, fantastic in the PC version, was weighed down by the lower memory of the consoles and became not bad, but it was more erratic, since that of the compatible version displayed all kinds of tricks to getting difficult at levels of difficulty that are not too high either.
Almost three years later, the best we can say about Crysis is that, if the work at the visual level is enough, in a few months it will seem like a completely current game, almost a novelty. Technically it can maintain the type, but playably it has nothing to envy to other shooters of today, although its two subsequent installments lost steam in this regard. Neither Crysis 2 nor Crysis 3 are bad games, but they are more linear and far from exploiting the full potential that was supposed to this saga when it arrived back in 2007.
