But how does it play?
It's a mixed bag. I tried going through stealthy and I tried going through shooting everything that moved. Stealth sucked. It felt slow. The "sleep dart" add-on they give you can only fire once every ten seconds, and the bad guys wake up in a minute, so it's not very useful. And the silencer reduces your accuracy to the point where you might as well just punch the guy.
There were some environmental inconsistencies that made stealth frustrating. Lying low in the tall grass seemed to have no effect, but hiding behind a sparse bush made me completely invisible. Certain slopes that I had no issue standing on I would mysteriously slide off of when prone. I think it's safe to say that prone is generally considered more stable than standing.
Without my cloak on, I would instantly be taking fire from enemies in boats seventy meters away. Maybe that's fair on a high end system where I'd be able to see the enemy that far away too, but it's not fair on my system. Has anyone ever actually made a game that tweaked the visibility distance of the enemy AI based on the resolution you're running at?
Using my cloak, I could have a little fun tormenting lone baddies, but if you screw up, you're pretty much dead as AK fire at close range will end you tout suite. Plus the enemies go down so easily (on normal difficulty) that there's generally no point to stealth. I suppose more difficult enemies later in the game may make stealth a necessity. I hope not, though. It was no fun.
Going in guns blazing was more fun. Actually, having gained a healthy respect for the bad guys' guns, I was still picking them off and outmaneuvering them more than mowing them down. The guns aren't very accurate, so I wasn't about to trust my life to spray and pray. Outmaneuvering the enemies is pretty easy and fun. They basically close in on wherever they saw you last, maybe throwing a grenade in, meaning all you have to do is put something between you and them, walk around it, and shoot them in the back while they're wondering where you went. I call it Elmer Fudd AI.
Emboldened by my success in taking down the big enemy compound with no problem, I decided it was time to have a little fun. I picked up an explosive drum and put in the back of a pickup, planning to send it hurtling into the checkpoint for fun. But as my slip slidin' experience with the prone stance indicated, the physics of the game wasn't up to the job. There was a continuous clanging from the back of the truck, like the the barrel was continually "running into" the truck bed instead of resting in it. Eventually it stopped, but when I got out of the truck to shoot a guy, I looked in the back and discovered the barrel had disappeared. I suppose that's better than blowing up for no reason and killing me, but it's still kind of sad when Half-Life 2 was doing better physics almost three years ago and Crysis is supposed to be so advanced. Of course, even Half-Life 2: Episode 2 had to have special case code to attach a physics object to a vehicle, so maybe I should cut the Crytek guys some slack. :P
Regardless, I won't be upgrading to play Crysis.
(I'll be upgrading when those marvelous 512MB GeForce 8800 GTs hit $200. :)
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