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. The original game has physics-enabled foliage - machine-gun fire chops down bushes and trees. The remaster doesn't have this.
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 they only lose in the end because the enemy is an immortal cheater. 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, but slower and less fun.
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 worse the sequels had different storylines, because the team decided to do a soft reboot with
Crysis 2. Nomad and chums from Crysis 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 to being a solid budget title stroke historical curiosity. Crysis Warhead is similar but more consistent - it has far fewer aliens - and in retrospect if Crytek had grafted the first part of Crysis onto the entirety of Warhead the resulting game would have been much better.
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 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?
