The film starts with Wade and Laura Porter with their son Michael.  A noise is heard and Wade investigates to find his house being burgalled.  He follows the burglar out the house and see’s him reach in to his pocket, Wade hits the burglar with a baseball on the head and kills him resulting in him being sent to prison where he must befriend some of societies worst criminals.

Trailer:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr0zDhqfOVo

The Escapist

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

Gametrailers HD

Gametrailers SD

I can only assume it is not to spook the horses or cause damage to them as they are rather expensive so I hear. Why not put lots of padding in the back of the van, then they can floor it and the horse would just bounce of the side of the cabin.

Or an even more imaginative way would be to have horse hammocks. This way they would just gently swing in the back while the vehicle is under acceleration or quick deceleration (braking for the illiterate (stupid)).

I have estimated that I waste at least 5 minutes by having to drive slower than the speed limit behind horses every week. Not a lot you say, but that is 260 minutes a year. That is over 4 hours!!

4 hours a year spent driving behind a van looking at a horses arse poking out the back.

There are hammocks for dogs, there must be hammocks for horses.

Graphics

First off, the graphics. Crysis has been hyped so much purely due to it’s graphics, and after playing the demo I can see why.

This screenshot is taken on the High setting at 1920×1200 with 0xAA.

The game itself recommends Medium settings for my PC and I can see why. High settings definitely are not playable. Medium suffers slight slowdowns at points but it never seemed to do it through fire fights so my life wasn’t in danger.

My specifiations are so:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 3.2GHz
• 2GB PC6400 DDR2 @ 400MHz
• Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB
• Dell 2407WFP @ 1920×1200

Given the budget of just the PC itself excluding monitor you are looking around £700-800 new which isn’t bad considering it runs Crysis pretty smoothly at such a high resolution.

Gameplay

Well the gameplay is similar to most FPS in that you point your gun and shoot. You have the same sort of layout as Far Cry in the way you have small chapters with checkpoints in it. Although you are told to do certain objectives you can go about them your own way which gives you a little individuality about the game. In my opinion it is still very linear, but linear works so why not have a linear game?

Crysis does offer some neat little tricks that makes it differ from your standard FPS.

Nano Suit

The nano suit is with you from the start although it isn’t mentioned until a slight accident happens in the air when you parachute fails to deploy.

The nano suit is basically a high tech full body suit that integrates itself with the person wearing it and allows them to have special abilities.

• Armour
• Speed
• Strength
• Cloak

Armour is the default setting on the suit and I imagine like myself you will leave it on armour most of the time. Armour gives the suit some extra strength making your defenses against bullets higher. With armour set you also gain health.

Speed gives you insane speed. I haven’t actually used this in the game as a tactical advantage, the few times I did use it was because my car got shot at and the tyres burst so I had to run to the next checkpoint.

Strength increases your strength which means you punch extra hard and also allows you to make higher jumps. This is very useful and has to be used in the rocky environment to get past some large boulders and fallen trees.

Cloak hides your character for a short period of time so your enemies can’t see you. I found this ability the most useful out of the 3 non-default ones as I was able to more or less plant frag grenades at the enemies feet although once the grenade is down they can see the grenade and you are most likely visible as the cloak runs out very quickly.

Weapon Customization

You have the ability to customize weapons on the go such as adding tactical sight, flashlight and silencer etc which is very helpful at times although I don’t like the way the game sort of pauses to allow you time to do it, it isn’t as realistic as it could be.

Breakable Trees

What you saw in the trailers and developer videos is true, you can shoot down trees. After a while you can use it to your advantage to make trees land on the enemy and get some good kills.

Story

Well the story starts off with you in an airplane getting a quick briefing from the regulatory black guy. A science team has gone missing on an Island belonging to North Korea and you are to get the team back. Unfortunately no one has heard from them except for a distress beacon from their boat which isn’t to be seen.

It is at this point that you are to parachute down to the Island with your team to rescue the team with your teammates. At this stage your parachute fails to deploy and you end up hurtling to the ground and in to the water.

You are then instructed to meet up with your team which seems to be scattered across the Island.

You soon find yourself in action against some North Koreans and this pretty much continues with different scenery around you until the story starts to unfold a bit more.

It appears the Koreans issued a complete evacuation of the Island and have locked it down.

Upon further investigation of the Island you find the boat of the science team up in the mountains which is frozen although the Island is nice and sunny…..

End of demo.

Final Thoughts

Overall I am impressed. The game can pause a little bit but that is to be expected with a demo release and early drivers which I am sure will be optimized as time goes on, we all know how good Nvidia are at delivering good driver packages. I am also sure the game will have it’s own patches too not soon after release to fix any problems that people may have, I don’t think EA will have much say patches wise, so I don’t think we should have the usual EA problems.

I think it is well worth the purchase. The demo has done what it should of, show what the game can do and to give you a taste of the story to want more.

I am eagerly waiting the release of the full game in November.