The gameplay's good, the AI however....
In broad genre terms, Crysis is a standard first person shooter. You get a load of guns, fire them at the bad guys and move on. But putting your finger on the gameplay in Crysis is pretty tricky as you get more free-roaming throughout the vast majority of the game, you’ve got arguably the most interactive environment yet seen, enemy AI and that Nanosuit, all of which play a contributing role in the overall Crysis experience… we’ll look at each separately and bring ‘em all back together at the end.So, free-roaming: How it works is quite simple. You’re given a task to complete, usually with a marker on your map to show where you have to go and then the rest is up to you. Now where Crysis improves upon Far Cry is that the environment is less restricting on the paths you take than Far Cry ever was. In Far Cry there was a fair amount of ‘funnelling’, you could free-roam up to a point and then you had to take a certain path. You see less of that in Crysis, it still happens, especially if the game needs you to go to a certain location for the purposes of continuing the storyline. One of the improvements here over Far Cry is that even though you are being generally funnelled along one path it’s a really, really broad path, which has multiple routes along it.
Click for larger imageIf you choose the path of less resistance and wander off the direct route in search of a sneaky way towards your objective, you might receive a secondary objective because you’ve closed in on a nearby camp or radar station etc. It’s really up to you if you try to infiltrate these objectives or just skirt around them and carry on with the main mission. These secondary objectives, rather than being just an aside to artificially increase the playing time, actually have an effect on the rest of the mission. You might get a heads-up on where some enemy forces are or you might be able to cripple their communications or even draw forces away from your main objective if you fluff your assault and they call in for backup.
The point is, though the secondaries have obvious benefits, how they work is much more realistic and the effects of your actions are more subtle than just a ‘yes/no’ affect on the rest of the mission. For example, taking out a comms station quietly might be beneficial in the long term but the enemy will know something is up. You could leave it and just gather some intel but then you run the risk of them being able to call in support more easily later. But if you’ve got the intel, you know the hotspots to avoid… of course, if you fluff it and make a scene, not only will they know where you are, they’ll know what you’re up to as well… not good if you want to avoid 40 enemy troops readied up and waiting for you…
Click for larger imageHelping this along is the enemy AI, which for the North Koreans you encounter early on, is perhaps some of the best AI we’ve seen… in places. And I say ‘in places’ because the AI in Crysis is very realistic in certain situations but in others it’s just about as dumb as you’ll ever see. For me this is a pretty big disappointment as I was hoping we’d see some decent AI and to some extent, we do…
On a group scale, in the open, the AI in Crysis seems to be aware of their situation at all times. A troop in a firefight with you may well back off and, if help arrives, only advance again once they think they’ve got numbers and firepower on their side. In one of the early missions you’ll see this as soldiers organize a fighting retreat, only to come back again once more troops turn up with a heavy calibre machine gun mounted on a Humvee.
Click for larger imageThat’s all well and good and I was quite pleased with how realistic it felt. But then I got to an indoor environment and, well, the AI degenerated into the standard you’ll see any other FPS game. I hid around a corner, waited until I saw an AI pop his head up and shot him, then waited for the next one to appear... and the next and the next and the next… until I’d killed a good twenty or so without doing anything other than reloading. The AI made no attempt to use grenades or try and swarm me and even yelled out they were coming to get me… Which was fine except by that time there was a massive pile of bodies in the stairwell and, for some reason, the AI couldn’t figure out how to get over it. So they all just milled around at the bottom where a few grenades cleared some more until they congregated again, as you can see in the screenshot above.
Sometimes the AI will spot you from miles away, whilst closer guys will be oblivious and not react to their comrades firing over their heads. My personal favourite though was sitting there all cloaked up and having an AI walk into me, realise there’s something in his way, get all antsy and then, after a short while, he carries on patrolling as if nothing is amiss. And dumb moments aren’t just limited to the enemy AI. In later sections, one of my tank guys spent a good five minutes trying to blow up a Korean tank with a machine gun. Well done.
Click for larger imageI’m not saying the AI is necessarily bad I’m just saying that if you’re expecting some uber-leap forward in AI, you won’t find it here. The AI is definitely better than Far Cry’s and seems to work pretty well outdoors, but, especially considering how it reacts indoors, I’d say F.E.A.R.’s AI tips it for that.