The lesson that Crytek must have learned by now is that advertising your game by boasting that its graphics engine is so powerful that it will bring most computers to their knees is probably not a good idea. Everything in Crysis’ pre-release marketing hype heavily touted it as the game to get to show off your ultra-powerful and expensive system that puts gaming consoles to shame. But as Bill Harris noted in his blog, it didn’t even manage to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks of release while the 10th rated console game sold over 300,000 copies in the same time. It is a telling fact that Crytek recently announced that their next game, a sequel to Far Cry, will be available on both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 as well as the PC.

The sad thing here is that Crysis is a game that does deserve to sell better. It has the greatest graphics ever seen in a game thus far, yes, but it also has a huge playing area that allows an open-ended approach to solving tactical problems in-game, it gives the player a cool set of abilities that combined with the nifty physics in the game makes all sorts of wacky actions and situations possible, emergent gameplay of the most spontaneous kind, and it’s the kind of game that, innumerable flaws notwithstanding, make you sit back and grin when you think of the crazy shit you’ve just managed to pull off.

That Crysis’ graphics look amazing is an understatement. It is so good in fact that you don’t even think about the graphics. I crash through a dense jungle, branches and bushes clawing at my body, and stop at a cliff. A beach lies below, waves gently lapping at the sand. The sun has just risen, giving the sky an orange tinge. Coconut trees sway in the breeze, while birds wheel across the sky and chickens peck at the dirt. There’s a North Korean camp there. I fall prone, trusting in the thick undergrowth to keep me out of sight and take out my binoculars. I see a soldier stand on the dock and urinate into the sea, another walks around lazily. A patrol boat cruises in the harbour, with a menacing-looking machine gun on it, alert to intruders. Everything just is, as you’d expect such a scene to look in real life. It’s not quite photorealistic yet, but it’s when you see in-game graphics that look better than most games’ pre-rendered cutscenes that you finally realize what the overused phrase “next generation graphics” really means.

Even more impressive than the quality of the graphics, is the vastness of the world Crytek’s managed to build and the incredibly far draw distances the engine can render. To give you a sense of the game’s scale, in one level, I’m told to infiltrate a North Korean base. I follow a steep path up a mountainside, and there’s a deep chasm between my position and the base, with a rickety-looking rope bridge spanning it. Predictably, there are a pair of machine gun nests protecting that approach. As I get closer, they spot me and raise the alarm, firing their weapons wildly and cursing. I dive behind a tree for cover but the gunfire tears the rope bridge to pieces. I look down. The bottom of the chasm seems far away, but I don’t seem to have a choice. I make my way down, skipping from rock to rock, then suddenly I lose my footing and fall. I plunge into the water which saves my life, but the force of the fall sends straight to the bottom of the river. I swim to the surface and stare at the steep cliff face that seems impossibly tall. Resignedly, I make my way downriver to look for another way to get into the base.

The world isn’t just a pretty but static backdrop either. Almost everything in it can be interacted with or destroyed. Twigs and fallen branches, empty bottles of mineral water, cardboard boxes and plastic buckets, even the live chickens and tortoises can all be picked up and thrown if you’re so inclined, though there’s no real reason to do so. Hold an intense firefight in the jungle and watch stray bullets kick up dirt and buzz saw through trees, sending branches and leaves tumbling to the ground. Throw a grenade at a machine gun nest and you’ll see the explosion knock away the sandbags. If you see a tank gunning for you and think you can take cover in a nearby shed, think again. A single shell from the tank will blast the shed into kindling and you with it. Destroy a helicopter and pieces of flaming parts rain onto the ground.

The ability to use just about any vehicle you can see makes this feel even more like the open-world Grand Theft Auto games. Hop into a jeep and use its machine gun to mow down enemy soldiers, or simply run them down. Steal a dinghy and send it flying over a waterfall while enemy soldiers shoot at you from the shore, like a scene out of a James Bond movie. Later in the game, there’s even an obligatory sequence involving you piloting a VTOL jet and dogfighting aliens. It’s a frustrating point in the game for many, but it does serve to demonstrate how far the engine can stretch.

As one of the few soldiers outfitted with the technologically advanced and expensive nanosuit, you have a variety of abilities and tools at your disposal as you romp around the island in which the game is set. The default power that you have is armour mode, which, as expected, makes you tougher, and more importantly, allows you to regenerate health faster. Other than this, the most often used power is stealth mode, which makes you invisible to enemies provided that you don’t activate it when they’re looking right at you. The other two modes, speed, which lets you run really fast but only for a very short time, and strength, which allows you to one-hit kill enemy soldiers with a super punch and jump incredible distances, are much less useful, but have the nice combined effect of making you feel like a Jedi.

To addition to your standard arsenal of guns, you have an assortment of weapon attachments including a silencer, medium and long range scopes, a laser pointer and a tactical attachment that shoots a paralysis-inducing drug. These are mostly interchangeable, so you can, for example, attach a long range scope to a standard assault rifle to make it into a sniper rifle when the precision rifle runs out of ammunition. Even your pair of binoculars is a fancy piece of gadgetry. You can use it to “tag” enemies you see, making them visible on your tactical map, and its sound pickup ability allows you to hear sound from whatever direction the binoculars are pointed towards. With all this nifty hardware, you’re a one-man army sent to terrorize the poor North Koreans occupying the area and later repel the predictable alien invasion.

This brings us to the biggest flaw in the game. The first half of the game, when you’re stalking through the jungle ambushing soldiers like the Predator is eminently fun. The huge and open levels meant that after I completed the game and replayed the game at Delta, the highest difficulty level, I was able to handle each of the encounters, enemy patrols and bases in an entirely different way. Do you crash a humvee straight through the gates of a base, run down the surprised guards and mow down the rest with the mounted machine gun? Do you skulk about the edges of the bases, silently picking off guards that stray too far from their fellows? Do you counter-snipe an enemy sniper, take over his guard tower and methodically snipe every guard in the base? The choice is yours. In many cases, the most effective solution to a tactical problem might be to take a leaf from Sam Fisher of Splinter Cell and simply avoid the enemy and get on with your mission objectives.

The second half of the game however has you deal with the aliens that have crashed on the island and this completely changes the nature of the game. While the initial encounters with the aliens are suitably tense and your exploration of the otherworldly environment of the alien ship is exciting at first, it drags on for far too long. More importantly, what were previously open levels suddenly becomes tight and linear, as you’re shuffled from one encounter to the next. Even the nature of the fighting changes. Where previously you were observing enemy soldiers from afar and planning the best ways to ambush them or whittle down their numbers slowly, fighting the fast and tough aliens takes no tactical planning and becomes a circle-strafe contest like something out of Doom or Quake. The squid-like anatomy of the aliens means that you can’t even head-shot them so there’s no point in precise shooting.

The game’s performance also starts to degrade significantly when the aliens first show up and gets worse, or at least it did on my machine. The final boss battles seem more appropriate for a console game than a PC shooter and despite the fairly small area of the arena, had my system, which seemed to have no problems rendering the far vaster and complex island levels, struggling badly. This leads me to suspect that the last few levels were poorly optimized.

There are other little niggling annoyances with various parts of the game as well. For example, why is falling prone an on-off toggle while crouching requires you to keep a key held down? I ended up having to crawl around the island on hands and knees to minimize my chances of being detected and maximize cloaking time. It’s effective but feels silly. And the gorgeous graphics only make small flaws more glaring: some of the ground and rock textures look distinctly low quality while in one place I noticed grass floating in mid-air. Furthermore, like many games which boast realistic physics, objects in Crysis seem too “twitchy” at times, for example, a rotor blade from a destroyed helicopter will continue to twitch on the ground long after all of the debris should have settled down. And does a single shotgun blast really suffice to chop down a coconut tree?

The enemy AI, a marketing bullet-point, leaves a lot to be desired. Often, they’ll act intelligently enough, behaving in lifelike ways when out of combat and fanning out to investigate a noise for example, but even at Delta difficulty, they seem to be completely unable to cope with your stealth ability. You can enter stealth mode while crouching behind, say, a crate, pop up to kill an enemy, which breaks stealth, crouch again to restealth and repeat while your enemies shout at each other in confusion. The smart thing here for the AI to do when confronted by an enemy that can turn invisible is to rush at him while they can still see him and keep him in sight as much as possible, but they never seem to be able to do that. At the same time, enemy helicopters are annoyingly omniscient: they seem to magically know where you are at all times even when cloaked which makes escaping them a real chore.

One missed opportunity on Crytek’s part irked me particularly. At a select few points in the game, you face North Koreans who wear knock-off versions of your own nanosuit and possess the same abilities you do. This could have been a wonderful opportunity for your enemies to play the same cat-and-mouse game against you that you’ve done against all of the normal soldiers so far. Instead, they seem to have the same AI as the other enemies, being different only in that they’re extraordinarily tough and that you can’t see them until the moment they attack.

For these reasons Crysis is merely a good shooter instead of a great one. Honestly, you won’t miss much by skipping the alien part of the game entirely, but the first part is so good and so replayable that it more than makes up for it. Attack enemies from the water or from the air, sneak up on them and grab them, run up to them and toss them around with your super strength, use speed to slip behind them while they try to bring their guns to bear on you, even throw a live chicken at them and see what happens. The possibilities are endless. From what I hear of the power and ease of use of its editor, I’m sure that there will be some incredible mods for this game in the near future and people are already talking about mods to recreate Aliens vs. Predator and Jurassic Park using the Crysis engine, all of which makes this a more than worthy addition to any gamer’s library.