Crysis Preview

If you’re reading this, then you’re reading it on a state-of-the-art 32-inch widescreen monitor. After investing literally thousands of dollars on your gaming rig, your computer is arguably smarter than you are.  You love the smell of shrink-wrap.  You hate the word “Macintosh.”  You refer to your brain as “CPU” and to your body as “this host flesh.”

And that’s why the perfect shooter for you is EA’s jungle/alien shooter, Crysis.  A giant graphical upgrade from the already lush Far Cry, Crysis looks like a gorilla of processing power.  Visually, Crysis is absurd.  Each leaf of each piece of foliage lolls dreamily in the breeze.  Clouds skim across the azure skyscape.  Sunlight glints off the rippling water of a reflective lake.

But this is no paradise.  Filled with bad dudes and, later in the game, aliens, Crysis is less Bambi and more Rambo.  Non-linear in design, the game’s levels are constructed to allow for a variety of playing styles from stealth to balls-out bumrushing.  And the 32-player online game may capitalize on the game’s variety of environments—including a zero-g level that we haven’t seen yet.

It’s one thing to tame a wild and monstrous computer, it’s another to feed it.  And Crysis looks to be a giant slab of seasoned software, served rare.