All hail Crysis, the “Maximum Game”. How odd it feels to revisit this legendary mass-melter of motherboards, this bane of frame rates and comparison threads, on what passes for a budget gaming laptop 10 years down the line. The intro especially rouses much the same sense of everlasting absurdity and pathos you might get from Hadrian’s Wall or a Microsoft Zune, an orgiastic showreel in which bullets flatten themselves against quivering artificial muscles, and North Korean troopers gape at all the high-octane graphicsability coruscating around them as they’re hurled headlong into their friends. Once upon a time, you think to yourself, we called this the future. Alas, futures seldom age that gracefully.
Crytek owes its existence to its knack for such glitzy spectacle – the company’s breakthrough project was a dinosaur wilderness sim named X-Isle in 2000, a piece of graphics card benchmarking software that became the basis for the original Far Cry. Nowhere is that inheritance more evident than in Crysis, a moderately open-ended cybernetic shooter whose omni-capable Nanosuit armour is a bulging, flexing metaphor for its own technical achievement. At a time when browser and mobile games were the fashion and blockbuster PC exclusives were on the wane, Crysis was a bastion of hope for custom hardware junkies. To run it back in 2007 was to join a proud club of macho super-consumers, to straddle the cutting edge with cowboy hat in hand while filthy casuals and the less affluent made do with caveman fare like Call of Duty 4. The Warhead expansion leans into this crude stratification of player culture by purchasing power explicitly, with graphics options that range from “Mainstream” to “Gamer” – no prizes for guessing which is the higher setting.
Crysis 1 Intro Cinematic en HD Watch on YouTube
To play Crysis today is to remember that selling your art on the strength of its supporting tech is essentially writing the epitaph on the back of the box, though the game is still very handsome, with sprawling draw distances and sun rays fizzling through restless foliage. Beyond the odd smeary rock texture or, say, the absence of an animated transition when you collar a guard, it’s that addled fixation with Operating at the Max that dates it the most. There are still plenty of technophiles around and lest I sound too much like the sneering hipster I undoubtedly am, there’s nothing wrong with preferring a higher resolution or a faster frame rate, but PC gaming has come to be celebrated for its diversity and conceptual ambition rather than brute power. The idea of sticking it to the PlayStationistas with some hardcore anti-aliasing now seems deeply comic, like trying to restart the War of the Roses by egging a chipshop in Manchester.
Why, then, return to Crysis? One answer is that while many sandbox shooters echo its flexible balance of stealth, resilience and rapid movement, few manage this balance as elegantly and entertainingly. For all the spittle-frothed talk of adaptive polymers and hydrothrusters, the game’s smartest touch is a homely energy bar, shared by all of your Nanosuit’s abilities. The bar drains quickly – three or four super-jumps or a few seconds at warp-speed will empty it out – but refills almost as fast, and the result is a brisk little feedback loop of risk and reward, as you work out how much you can pull off in that window versus some pleasantly responsive soldier AI. You might speed through tall grass to a house, pause for a couple of seconds to catch your breath, jump onto the roof, cloak, line up a couple of headshots, then use the last 20 per cent of suit juice to zip sideways into the cover of a boulder, even as grenades fly towards the house, killing everybody inside. The Nanosuit is sold to you as the wrath of god, a hulking embodiment of the hardware required to run the game, but that ferocity belies the extent to which you’ll be exposed and vulnerable if you push it too far, and the interplay is handled with a flair that is genuinely a thrill to rediscover. You can’t buy Nanosuit performance like you can a faster GPU – it’s all about what you do with what you’re given.
The Nanosuit is also eerie and unsettling in ways I’m not sure Crytek itself ever appreciated. While creeping around the game’s fictitious South Pacific archipelago, I was struck by the thought that I was playing a horror story from the perspective of the monster. Imagine being one of the grunts unlucky enough to see service on Lingshan Island – gazing out over a lush stretch of rainforest and glimpsing far off, in amongst the sun shafts and palm fronds, an oily metal silhouette that immediately vanishes. You raise your rifle and step forward, calling out to your team, but it is already too late, as a shimmer at your elbow solidifies into something coiled and merciless and not quite of this world. It cuts down the men to your left and right and slithers back into the scenery, only to reappear seconds later, striking at the rear.