Crysis Single Player Demo Impressions

"Mercy," I'm almost sure I heard my PC cough that out somewhere between the part where it had to render an entire tree-stippled tropical island complete with light-beams and "god-rays" and volumetric clouds, and the other where between myself and an enemy squad of North Koreans, we managed to dismantle a couple ramshackle outposts piece by piece with nothing more than bullets.

Judging from the downloadable demo, Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent (here in the demo, only briefly glimpsed) alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

I've put a solid dozen hours in with the demo, trying different difficulty levels and replaying various situations and mostly just poking a game that's more than anything else constantly daring you to. The game offers so many ways to tackle a situation while cleverly offering subtle visual clues to get you thinking beyond a "top ten" tactics list. There's an area about halfway through the demo where you have to get past two North Korean soldiers coming down a road with an incline too steep to pass on either side. If you move fast enough, you come to a little half-circle path to the side. Race up it and you're temporarily out of sight behind a pile of logs. To one side, a second stack of logs is propped with sticks -- knock the sticks over and the logs roll a couple feet. So why wouldn't the logs perched at the top of the incline at this point nearly above the two approaching soldiers? Eureka! Engage your body suit's stealth mode, peek around the front, and sure enough: two more propped up sticks begging to be broken. Slide around behind the logs, engage your body suit's "maximum strength" mode, time it just right as the soldiers pass below you, then punch the log pile, and presto -- strike!

Or you could just hop in a jeep and try to run them over (at risk of attracting attention and deadly machine gun fire from the nearby patrolling watercraft). Maybe you'd rather park down the road and man the jeep's mounted MG to spray them down when they're in range? Use your suit's "maximum speed" mode to charge before they can fire, then at the last minute switch to "maximum strength," grab one by the neck and toss him violently at the other? Punch palm trees until they snap and fall on either soldier? And of course you could always just hide out of sight until they pass and ignore them altogether.

The demo -- the same one I played at GCDC in Leipzig, Germany this summer -- proves that the game's physics hype was anything but. Each object has its own physical properties and acoustic interrelationships with other objects. Throw a glass bottle too softly or against a softer surface, e.g. sand, and it won't break, but toss it against something hard like metal or concrete and it shatters. You can pick up everything from pots and pans to chickens and -- that's right -- use them to bludgeon your enemies to death. If you get a kick out of games where half the gameplay is "what happens if I combine this with this?" then Crysis is probably going to be keep you busy for countless hours. Tip from PC World's Danny Allen: Try shooting oil barrels at the top and bottom and you'll discover the game even models interior fluid levels -- oil barrels even drain accordingly!

As a tactical game, on the other hand, the demo leaves something to be desired. All told, it feels like a prettier, more nuanced version of Far Cry, but with some discouraging A.I. issues. On the one hand, enemies aware of your presence and position will flank and sneak right up behind you, quiet as can be. The latter can be shockingly creepy. Other shooters have the bad guys constantly announcing themselves like imbeciles to make your job easier by providing a kind of "audio radar." Here, the enemy is often as stealthy and spatially aware as you, and when the A.I. works, it works better than just about anything else.

But for the most part, the A.I. feels pretty clumsy. It never seems to know how to stay in cover, or where to go under fire, dashing around stupidly and making itself an easy target. Sometimes enemies run right past you, ignoring your presence, their programming's "get to X" logic obviously superseding the more obvious "avoid blatantly exposing my you-know-what." Most egregiously, some enemies don't recognize when nearby allies are taken out. No reaction, no heightened state of awareness, nothing. That's not to mention stealth kills made with your weapon's optional silencer -- sometimes you can pop a guy right next to his buddy and said buddy will keep on walking in plain sight. That's especially worrisome considering I had the difficulty set to "Delta," i.e. maximum. For an experience that lead designer Cevat Yerli has himself noted is so dependent on its single player virtues, the A.I. seems awfully superficial in the demo. Granted predicting nuanced A.I. behavior in increasingly open-ended environments is becoming like meteorology, i.e. good luck getting anything like predictable results. Still, a game's a game, and it has to work, no matter how cool the "navel-gazing" tech looks. Maybe Crytek bit off more than it could chew the way Bethesda's did with its "radiant" A.I. in Oblivion?

Oh yeah, you probably want to hear about how it performs, right? I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 overclocked from 2.4 GHz to 3.3 GHz on air (and Prime 95 "torture test" error-free, for those that care) with 2 GB of 800 MHz Corsair DDR2-RAM overclocked to 925 MHz. I have a single eVGA Nvidia 8800 GTX with 768MB slightly overclocked to 610 MHz (core) and 1000 MHz (memory).

Speaking in rough figures using Fraps 2.9.2, Vista 32-bit at detail set to 'high' (4x AA, 1280x1024) produces frame rates in the low 30s, dropping into the low 20s when panning across thickly-forested areas. Crank the detail up to 'very high' and the frame rate drops into the teens, which -- let's just say anything less than 24 I consider too slow for "playable," though for whatever reason (the motion blur maybe?) Crysis's 24-30 range feels like other games' 30-60.

Switching to XP, those numbers climb significantly on like-like settings. At 'high' detail running XP 32-bit (4x AA, 1280x1024) I rarely drop much below 30, and if you apply the 'very high' under XP tweak described here which adds all (or most of) the purported DX10 effects, the frame rate never dips below the low 20s. Quite playable, in other words, though looking at my specs and overclock settings, I'm hardly mainstream-representative. Chances are most folks running either Vista or XP will end up compromising with medium detail settings or trading stuff like shader and shadow effects to get better textures and physics.

Our final review build is on its way, at which point I hope to be able to test the game with Vista 64-bit (demo benchmarks suggest a realistic 10-15% performance increase per thread) as well as a quad-core processor to see just how well the CryENGINE2 actually scales across multiple cores.

Comments

Post a comment Post a comment

0 / 1000 max characters