Crysis®

What? A dull shooter that brought joy to video card manufacturers. I had a friend who fried his Radeon card because the fans went like a reactor whenever this game ran. Like i said, a dull shooter with some top secret suit, on an island, trying to admire nature but rudely interrupted by Koreans only to discover that the reason for you being there is much more "sinister" than you have ever imagined with an ending good for a Hollywood movie. It aged...well.... okey, i guess. At the time i realized this one was in the books only as a benchmark game. The only thing to discuss about this game is that it came in 2007 and its graphics were more than impressive, yey. Story? Not worth mentioning it. Characters? Neaah. Sound? Maybe, yes. Gameplay? Nothing revolutionary even for its time but decent, and fluid with a fair amount to explore on a fair map.

Before I got my hands on Crysis I had heard a lot of praise. Therefore, I had high hopes for it. Unfortunately, I was disappointed quite a bit with the game that some claim to be legendary. The game offers open spaces as if encouraging you to explore, but really there is no real point to do so. There is no loot, you can't get any special weapons or anything. There is no reason to not follow the main objectives. The selection of guns is very limited, and I found most of them quite boring and unimpressive. The gunplay is quite weak in my opinion and not satisfying at all. The enemies are quite bullet spongy, while it does not take a lot to kill you. The story, in my opinion, is not very good. Although I did like the whole ancient alien angle. The voice acting is nothing to write home about and the characters themselves are not very interesting. On the technical side, I experienced a lot of annoying crashing without any error message. Also, I had some frame drops in some places. Not sure if it was my PC or what. I am able to run much newer games much more smoothly. I got bored 5 hours in and decided to drop the game. All in all, not as good as I was led to believe. I'd choose F.E.A.R. or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. over Crysis any day.

The graphics of this game still look very good today, the performance is fine (but there 4 crashes during the playthrough, 3 of them in the level where you fly the VTOL). The game contains 11 levels and I beat it in three evening sessions on 'hard' difficulty (there is also the higher 'delta', but I didn't dare for the first playthrough). The North Korean enemies often attack in groups bigger than its predecessor Far Cry, especially near or in installments, but don't seem to be that smart (e.g. don't try to flank you anymore). Their snipers aren't dealing out as much pain. Vehicles with MGs are a big threat, while fixed MGs often get re-manned after the previous soldier there has fallen and you can get take several foes down at one position. Ammunition can be found aplenty, the customizability of the weapons makes carrying the sniper rifle unnecessary - just put the sniper scope on the North Korean assault rifle. Most levels play outside and the enemy will often notice you even if you sneak except you are in area with much cover (e.g. wood) where you can use the cloak mode of the nanosuit and e.g. silenced pistols to thin out the guards of an enemy base. Sometimes, you can choose if you take the road (maybe in a vehicle), the foliage next to it or the creek behind it, but they all are very close and you can switch between them all the time which makes a rails shooter experience. The camps are the situations where it's up to you to secure the area. If you likely intense fights in a scenic landscape, then this game is for you. Only 4 stars because the enemies are too generic and easy for my taste (no 'oh sh*t' moments, you can even use the speed mode to run away), it's advertised as open world game here (but e.g. no comparison with the Boat or Rebellion maps of Far Cry) and the unconvincing storyline (especially regarding the North Koreans).

super game

So, the game works, at least. It still crashes to desktop every now and then but at least I get to play it unlike the Steam version which simply doesn't work at all. A quick question for the community, though. How can I update it to 1.2.1? The game that is installed by the GoG installer is at version 1.1.1.6156