01.27.08
crysis
I picked up Crysis the other day. Then finished it today. It was… kind of short.
Good: Beautiful engine, decent performance, good single player gameplay. Great AI. The character design approaches the edge of uncanny valley. Neat physics, fairly destructible environments. Saving and loading is nearly instant*. The game performance, barring other issues, is pretty stable. The max difficulty level was challenging without being over the top. You can alt-tab in and out of it quickly, and it thoughtfully pauses the game whenever you go back to the desktop (even if another application steals focus). Apparently there’s a great level editor. I’ll have to play with that later.
Meh: Weird physics bugs. Step on a plank, plank collides with floor, plank ejects itself at mach 30, plank propels you into the ceiling. Instant death. This happened often enough to be annoying, but not so often as to ruin things. Small graphics glitches throughout. Also: a lackluster final fight.
Spoiler’d:
Bad: One show stopper bug toward the end of the game. *The save mechanism broke down in a late level, meaning that the game would pretty much lock up whenever a save occurred. My google-fu told me that this was introduced in a recent patch. Luckily, I read this article a few months ago, and an idea struck me:
- Start a new game on the current difficulty level.
- Use the dev console to skip ahead to the beginning of the last level you made it to.
Oddly enough, it worked. My hypothesis: the save file contained a record of all game events up to the point of the save. Which means that the devs didn’t bother to start a new record at the beginning of each level. Since you can’t travel back to old levels, I don’t know why it would have been done this way. Starting a new record, though, means that your save thread starts fresh.
Also, the patch appears to have broken multiplayer. As in… many people who have installed the patch can’t connect to servers. People like me. I did make it online once; it looks like it could be (have been) neat. The Gamespy powered server browser was almost as bad as the browser for Battlefield 2.
The EA logo on the corner of the box tells me everything I need to know about these problems. Every 18 months or so, I cave in and decide to give EA another shot. This one lived up to every expectation I had of an EA title. Don’t get me wrong – there’s a really decent game here. It just needs another patch or three before it’s out of beta.
This will probably influence my timing when I pick up Spore in a few months. With Crysis, I waited for the first patch to come out; I figured that other people could work out the kinks through EA’s unofficial beta test program, and I could pick up the title at a slight discount while reaping the benefits of their hard work. I guess I bought in too soon. I’ll be smarter next time; maybe Spore 1.2 will be the one to grab.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled by quality over the past 12 months. STALKER, Bioshock, all of the Orange Box titles, Supreme Commander, the WoW expansion; all of these just worked. No frantic Google searches through dozens of forum threads on hundreds of different system configurations reporting identical, reproducible bugs. Just install and play.