Crysis

Yes. The answer is yes. It can. It can run Crysis. It's 2023, of course it can. Today we're going to have a look at Crysis, a popular video game from 2007, but first we're going to wind back a little, to 2004. The year of Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry. It was a good year for PC games, especially single-player first-person-shooters.

All of those games had multiplayer, but no-one cared. People bought them for the single-player experience. They were released in a little gap that opened between the first wave of multiplayer hits - Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, the original Counter-Strike and Team Fortress etc - but before the Battlefield and Modern Warfare franchises really took off. For a while the PC market was bored with multiplayer games and hankered for single-player action.

The PC gaming scene was also going through one of its periodic blue funks. Up until the late 1990s the PC and console markets were totally different, but by the early 2000s the XBox and PlayStation 2 had achieved a degree of technical parity with gaming PCs, at which point the vastly greater sales and profit margins of console games sent a shiver through the PC gaming scene.

Half-Life 2

It felt unfair, because first-person-shooters began on the PC, but on a coldly rational level the console market was too huge to ignore. None of the ten best-selling games of 2004 were PC titles, and at least in the United States console games outsold PC games six-to-one. The big worry wasn't so much that publishers would abandon the PC entirely, but that games would be developed for consoles and then ported to the PC with minimal changes, without taking advantage of the platform's greater power.

In that context Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry felt like a vote of confidence in the PC. They were all eventually ported to consoles, but they looked best on the PC. Or Macintosh in the case of Doom 3. But the point still stands. They looked best on the PC, preferably an expensive PC with an Athlon 64 and a GeForce 6800 GT or something like that. But this was the early 2000s and everybody had six credit cards so cost wasn't a problem.

Doom 3

Those three games were also stealth adverts for gaming engines. Doom 3 showed off Id Tech 4's lighting and bump mapping, Half-Life 2 showed off the versatility of Valve's Source, and Far Cry demonstrated the lush scenery and expansive environments of Crytek's CryEngine. At the time Crytek was an unknown quantity. Far Cry was their first game, but it attracted rave reviews and went on to sell over two and a half million copies, solid numbers for a PC exclusive.

On a personal level I never enjoyed Doom 3, and Far Cry left me cold, but Half-Life 2 still holds up. I've written about it before. The maps are blocky and the textures are very simple by modern standards, but the art direction and visual storytelling are still very impressive. Nonetheless the game was compromised by its role as an engine showcase. There was surprisingly little shooty-shooty for something that was marketed as a first-person shooter. In fact all three games were compromised in some way. Doom 3's shadows were overused, Half-Life 2 was marred by overlong driving sequences, and Crytek put so much work into the outdoors environments of Far Cry that the indoors sections felt unfinished.

At this point there should be a block of screenshots of Far Cry, but I'm not going to reinstall that game. Instead here's STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, a game that - just like Crysis - was another showcase of what the PC could achieve when developers didn't have to care about the weak GPUs and tiny memory limits of games consoles:

Far Cry was published by Ubisoft, but shortly after the game came out Crytek signed a deal with Electronic Arts instead. As a result Ubisoft continued the Far Cry franchise without Crytek's involvement, while Crytek went off to make Crysis, which was essentially Far Cry with cybernetics.

For a while the two franchises were rivals, but eventually Crysis fizzled out. The last Crysis game, Crysis 3, came out in 2013. In contrast Far Cry is still very popular. Crytek still exists, but I'm not sure what it does. The company never managed to develop a second franchise that would take up the slack in between Crysis games, and although the CryEngine powered a bunch of almost-but-not-quite A-list titles - the 2017 Prey and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture are the two that everybody remembers - it was nowhere near as popular as the Unreal engine.

I learn from the internet that during its heyday Crytek built or acquired development studios in the United States, the UK, China, South Korea, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Ukraine, which is impressive for a company that only released around half a dozen full-price games. I wonder if the money from Far Cry and Crysis went to their heads? Did the owners enjoy the idea of having a development studio in Tokyo, so that they could fly to Tokyo on business? Who knows.

Sometimes I change the water. Sometimes the water changes me.

I mean, "in Tokyo, on business" is a really good FourSquare status update. I've never done business in Tokyo. I've never even been there. Still, let's look at Crysis, the original game. What is Crysis? It's a first-person shooter that takes place in a series of large, open-air levels. The hero is a soldier called Nomad, although technically his name is Jake Dunn, but everybody calls him Nomad because Jake Dunn is a stupid name.

Nomad has a special suit, a nanosuit, that can be programmed to make him briefly turn invisible, or boost his speed, his strength, or his armour, although each mode has a limited amount of battery life. The battery recharges quickly, so it's not too difficult to develop a rhythm whereby the player runs, cloaks, scouts the surroundings, runs some more, then cloaks again. The suit also gives Nomad regenerating health, but it only takes a few hits to kill him so this isn't as useful as it appears.

In each level the player is given an objective - infiltrate the base, point an artillery targeting laser at a SAM site, hack a laptop etc - but the levels are open-ended, like a cartoonish take on Operation Flashpoint or ArmA but with regenerating health and super-weapons. Crysis was released within a few days of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but it takes a completely different approach; CoD railroaded the player whereas Crysis is much more freeform.

Of the two games CoD turned out to be The Future, because it's easy to make a game look good on consoles if the player's freedom of movement is restricted. Crysis was a glimpse of an alternative future that hasn't happened yet.

Is that thing floating? Crysis' physics engine needed some more work, but it's impressive that the game has one. PC games embraced physics engines in the wake of Half-Life 2, but a lot of seventh-generation console titles toned down their physics in order to improve performance.

Is Crysis any good? Has it held up? Yes, and yes, but with one major caveat. On a technical level Crysis was famously demanding back in 2007. The mixture of lush vegetation and open-air environments played heck with temporary graphics cards, but as of 2023 it's overwhelmingly likely that your PC will run it at least acceptably well.

It still looks good. In particular the lengthy draw distance is impressive, at least in motion. The screenshots above have a Turok quality to them, what with the distance fog, but that's because it's hard to appreciate in a static screenshot that the distance fog is really far away. Crysis' rocks and terrain are blocky, and it doesn't have the subtle lighting glow of modern ray-traced titles, but on the whole it doesn't look like something that was released a year before Fallout 3.

Why has the game aged so well? It slightly predates the fad for overdone colour grading and excessive bloom, and as a result it isn't dated by its overall look. It doesn't have film grain or OTT lens aberrations. The main reason is that most games back then were built around the limitations of contemporary games consoles - some of which remained on sale well into the 2010s - whereas Crysis shot for the moon. The following images are from Mirror's Edge and Rage, which were released in 2009 and 2011, primarily for the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360.

They look great, but they achieved their visual polish by using extensive technical trickery. Mirror's Edge has baked-in raytracing and static maps that force the player down a linear path, while Rage uses level-wide custom textures and simple per-room lighting to mask its low-poly environments.

Crysis on the other hand does things the hard way. It has detailed maps, a large draw distance, and extensive use of physics, achieved not with prebaked textures or restrictive maps but instead by working the PC really, really hard.

Crysis: Warhead, a side-quel that used the same engine

Crysis was eventually ported to the PS3 and XBox 360, but not until 2011, at which point it used a version of the engine that had been optimised for games consoles. A remastered version was released in 2020 for the PlayStation 4, XBox One, and Nintendo Switch, apparently based on the 2011 console port; the remastered version was widely panned for looking no better than the PC original and in some cases worse.

On the positive side the remaster is a lot easier to get working with modern PCs. In order to get the original, 2007-vintage Crysis working I had to use this open source launcher, although it doesn't require any technical know-how, it just replaces the original executable.

But is Crysis any good? For the first three-quarters it's great fun. The player's mission is to check out a remote island that has been occupied by North Korea for reasons known only unto the North Koreans. In the process they took some hostages, which is not on. There's a little bit of lip service to stealth, but for the most part the game encourages the player to use the nanosuit's cloaking ability to get into a good ambush position and then blow everything up. It's not like Deus Ex, for example, where the player can infiltrate the enemy base and withdraw without ever being spotted.

I shot down a helicopter with a tank

There's something almost minimalist about the initial part of the game. There are only a handful of enemy types and the player is given all of the suit's abilities and most of the weapons right at the start. The game periodically introduces new elements - enemy nanosuit soldiers, tanks - but for the most part the fun comes from assaulting different targets in interesting ways. The enemy AI is particularly good, although most of the baddies immediately forget about the player whenever Nomad turns on his nanosuit's cloaking field. Helicopters are an exception, perhaps because they have thermal vision. They track the player relentlessly and are a massive pain.

The gameplay has some problems that might have been fixed with more playtesting. Nomad picks up missiles in blocks of three. They're most useful against helicopters, which take two missiles to kill; there's no way to top up the stock of missiles, so I continually found myself firing off the superfluous, third missile at nothing in particular just so I could pick up more missiles.

It's a minor thing, but every time I fired off the third missile I remember thinking that I could have donated it to Ukraine, or something. It's just a waste of expensive military hardware.

It's less obvious in the screenshot, but this waterfall has a lovely rainbow.

Nomad can drive vehicles, but they're mostly pointless, because the maps aren't that large. I repeatedly found myself hijacking a Humvee just so I could drive to the next bend in the road before hopping out again. Furthermore the vehicles are deathtraps. They attract a mass of attention and are very fragile. Some of them have built-in weapons, but the heavy machine guns are less powerful than the player's assault rifle, perhaps for balancing purposes.

Gameplay-wise a map in which the player drives a tank is great fun, but conversely a level in which the player flies a transport aircraft is simultaneously frustrating and boring. Frustrating because the player has to dogfight in a slow-moving transport aircraft while dodging tornados. Boring because it takes an age for the vehicle's health to regenerate, so I ended up spending minutes hovering in place, just waiting for my health to come back so that I could move on to the next section. How does a helicopter regenerate health? I don't know.

On a much more serious level I found myself unable to defeat the final boss the first time I tried, because it's surprisingly easy to enter the final arena without picking up a key weapon in the preceding map, and there's no way to backtrack at that point. I had to rewind to an earlier save and play the endgame all over again.

And it's a minor complaint, but despite the size of the maps there isn't any incentive to explore. There are no hidden bases or bonus levels. The game throws all of its weapons at the player near the beginning, so there aren't any rare guns. As with Far Cry the open-endedness occasionally devolves into giving the player just two paths, one directly to the objective and one slightly off to the side.

Take that, ammo dump.

The game reaches a peak with Onslaught, the fifth level, which is a large-scale combined arms assault against the North Korean army. It's enormous, hectic, and incredibly entertaining, but sadly the game goes to pot just after that. Nonetheless until that point Crysis deserved all the plaudits it got.

Incidentally the game has in-engine cutscenes, differentiated from the rest of the action with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen that fade in and out. The image just above illustrates the old-fashioned depth of field effect. The character models are good for the time, dated nowadays. Surprisingly the characterisation is okay. Lady scientist Helena Rosenthal's character model is obviously inspired by Lara Croft, but she never high-kicks or somersaults her way out of trouble, and the other characters are at worst unmemorable. Team-mates Psycho and Prophet are respectively caricatures of a British Super Army Soldier and an American Tough Drill Sergeant, but I found myself warming to them because they are at least well-acted caricatures. Tonally the game was surprisingly grounded.

I mention this because I wasn't expecting Crysis to have decent writing and voice acting, but it does. The North Korean soldiers are even voiced by Korean voice actors, in Korean, which is impressive attention to detail for an indie first-person shooter from 2007. Sadly none of the baddies stand out. The leader of the North Korean forces is a non-entity who dies in an uninteresting boss fight and the even-more-ultimate baddies have no characterisation at all.

There is a question of whether Crysis is offensive or not. It reminds me of the work of Roland Emmerich. He is a German film director who made a fortune by directing films that flattered audiences in the United States. On one level Crysis is a power fantasy in which an American super-soldier uses his superior technology to slaughter huge numbers of disposable North Koreans, as if the developers wanted to pander to the US audience. Beyond taking some hostages the North Koreans don't do anything particularly bad. The player kills them because they are a challenge to US hegemony.

But on the other hand I only managed to finish Crysis because I could reload at any time. Despite my nanosuit I died on numerous occasions, so on one level Crysis is a game in which poorly-equipped but extremely brave North Korean soldiers repeatedly take down a seemingly invincible technological terror (me) at great cost to themselves in men and equipment, and the only lose in the end because he cheats. So that's okay then.

Furthermore the Nanosuit is obviously a big transsexual metaphor - and it's treated in an entirely positive light - so that's also okay then. Crysis therefore gets ten out of ten woke points. I'm surprised that a game from 2007 could be so progressive but there you go.

I mentioned that the game goes to pot. After Onslaught the player infiltrates the island's central volcano, which turns out to be an alien megastructure. This involves a change of pace - a level in which Nomad floats around in zero gravity taking in the scenery:

It reminded me of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It's no fun to play, and most of the level is empty, but as a brief change of pace it's not problematic. The issue is that from that point onwards the game turns into a simplistic sci-fi shooter. Nomad emerges back onto the island to find that the Korean soldiers have been frozen to death, and from that point onwards he fights aliens. But there are only a handful of alien types - two, essentially - and all of the stealthy crawling and long-range combat elements from the first two-thirds of the game are abandoned in favour of shooting little bugs that hop around.

The game culminates in a level set on an aircraft carrier, which might have worked if the developers had been more committed to the change in gameplay - a burst of Doom 3-style corridor shooting would have been a welcome change from all the outdoors action - but instead most of the level involves running back and forth in order to trigger some cutscenes, and when the aliens finally do attack the gameplay is no more advanced than Quake.

The section pictured just above involves pressing a button, then running into the room beyond in order to activate a fuel rod, then running out again to allow the nanosuit's health to recharge. The player has to do this three times. There are no twists, no complications. It's just dull.

The game then rushes into a final battle, which involves shooting a large monster repeatedly until it dies. And then shooting another large monster in a series of designated places until it also dies. During which the player is harassed by enemies that fly up in the sky, which isn't fun because shooting aerial targets against a background of plain sky doesn't work in first-person shooters. It never works. It just highlights the fact that the player is making a mouse pointer intersect with an object.

The flying level was cut from the console ports. No-one missed it.

PROTIP: Circle-strafe

And so ultimately Crysis is frustrating. The first three-quarters of the game are great fun. The early levels even have some replayability, because the player can tackle the objectives in any order. Once I managed to get a hang of the nanosuit's abilities I found I could leap into the middle of the action and slaughter everybody instead of sneaking around all the time. It's a little bit like Doom Eternal in that respect, but with an added stealth dimension and less platforming, thank heavens.

But the game is quite short, so the opening levels don't last long, and the last quarter falls apart into a mess of scripted events and simplistic fights against two or three flying aliens at a time. It even loses its visual polish, because there are only so many ways to make the interior of an aircraft carrier look attractive. The final battle involves running around a metal football pitch shooting at a four-legged variation of the alien war machines from Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

And the game doesn't reveal anything at all about the aliens. Why are they attacking? Where did they come from? What do they want? It's not even apparent if they're intelligent creatures or robots. Crysis ends with a sequel hook, but to make things even worse the two sequels had different storylines, because the team decided to do a soft reboot with Crysis 2. The main characters were (spoilers) killed off in a tie-in comic (/spoilers) and then replaced again for Crysis 3. Which might explain why the series only lasted for three games. Just as I got to like Nomad and Prophet etc they were wrenched away.

Still, is Crysis worth buying? The original game is surprisingly hard to get hold of, because it has been replaced by Crysis Remastered. However Steam still sells it as part of a bundle with Crysis Warhead, which I picked up for £6.24 because it was on sale. At that price it's worth it if only to see what the fuss was about. At full price in 2007 the overwhelming impact of the first part of the game compensated for the drop in quality of the ending, but as of 2022 Crysis is merely good-looking, so any more than £15 or so is too much. It has gone from being a major A-list graphical showcase into a solid budget title stroke historical curiosity.

Incidentally my PC is very old. I built it myself from parts in 2011 and have upgraded it since then. It's essentially a maxed-out LGA-1155 machine, with a Xeon 1275 / i7-3770K. It can just about run Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 at 1920x1080. However some parts of Crysis tax it, particularly the floating level. The game has the same problem as Microsoft Flight Simulator X, in that it was developed on the cusp of the modern era. Crytek anticipated that the near future would belong to highly-clocked single-core CPUs, but in practice chip manufacturers found it hard to deal with heat dissipation in highly-clocked, single-core chips, so computing since the mid-2000s has increasingly embraced multi-core chips instead. Unfortunately Crysis mostly runs in a single thread, so it doesn't benefit from a multi-core setup.

In Crytek's defence lots of games from the late 2000s are unable to take advantage of multiple cores, but it's particularly unfortunate in Crysis' case, because the game's combination of large maps filled with physics-enabled objects and long view distances requires a beefy CPU with lots of memory.

On the positive side Crysis was one of the first major PC games to have 64-bit support, although for some reason the Steam version doesn't come with the 64-bit executable (it was added as a patch to the original DVD version of the game). The executable is however freely available, e.g. via the replacement Github thing linked to above. I'll link to it again so that you don't have to scroll up. Isn't that nice of me?