Awesome environments...
So let’s have a look at the environment, which for me is actually one of the crowning glories of Crysis. How do I put this without sounding gushing? Erm, the graphics are good? No, that's not right. The graphics are really, really nice? No, that's not it either. Ah yes, this is it: The graphics do the same thing to your eyeballs that an oily threesome with Kiera Knightley and Jessica Alba does to your libido...quite simply your eyes'll be having the best time of their lives. Stunning is probably not strong enough to explain what Crytek have achieved with the visuals in Crysis... they're all just bloody marvellous.Games of this ilk are all about immersion and Crysis has this in spades. Yes, I know an alien artefact with areas of zero-G is something we’re not very likely to experience, but even there things behave as you’d expect them to.
Popping back to the world we’re more familiar with for a moment, the interaction and realism here really is unprecedented in games so far. Basically, pretty much everything you see is a physical object in the game world. Sure, we’ve got the ‘window dressing’ of cans and bottles, tables and chairs etc. but in Crysis these are physical objects that you can interact with. Even out in the jungle, on the carrier or wherever you are, there’s tons of stuff that has no bearing on the game itself but you can pick up and play with.
The real icing on the cake is how the objects react to what’s going on around them. We’ve seen physics in games before, and Half Life 2 was really the pioneer of making physics part of the gameplay, and whilst Crysis doesn’t use the physics in the same way as Half Life 2, it uses it in a way that makes the world more believable. Lob a grenade into a hut and there’s not just an explosion that pops off inside the hut, neatly contained by the corrugated tin walls… No, what you get here is the hut pretty much being blown to smithereens with bits of wall, chairs, radios…the odd leg all flying past and scattering across the landscape.
Click for larger imageBut these new levels of physics do serve to highlight some flaws in the very same physics engine that’s doing all this good work. For example, take the hut I just blew apart with a grenade. How come I can blow the walls off with a shotgun? I get it that the force of a shotgun could be enough to tear a piece of iron off a post, but only if it was held on with chewing gum. And shooting the fuel tanks on the back of a Humvee invariably ends up with the Humvee exploding. Why? I once saw a truck on fire with drums of fuel in the back and though one of the drums went up with a deafening explosion, it didn’t take the truck with it. I suppose Crytek have struck a balance between physic realism and Hollywood style explosive fun and it is a lot of fun to blow the hell out of everything… it’s just that it feels more showy and less realistic when you do.
Much has been made, mainly in public demos by Crytek, of this level of interaction and I think, to some extent, they’ve sort of shot themselves in the foot a bit. I mean, every bugger knows that you can shoot the trees apart and they break in a realistic fashion. What hasn’t been talked about that much is the more subtle, finer points of this interaction, where you can create cover for yourself by felling a few branches or even try a John Woo style take-down by shooting the branches over the enemy… try a lobbing a grenade near a not-too-fat tree trunk… just remember that trees are big things and you can’t often outrun a falling one!
Click for larger imageBut the interaction goes deeper than that and ties in with the AI. You see, you’re not just a 3D box moving through the world, you’re an actual 3D model, interacting with the Crysis world. So by all means sneak through the undergrowth, but just be aware that you’re moving the foliage around you. Even if you’re cloaked, the sound of you moving and the swaying leaves around you can give you away… the AI will pick up on this.
You’ll probably not have the time in a firefight to notice, but even the passage of your bullets and those of the enemy are also marked by the environment as leaves ripple from muzzles blasts or as bullets zip between them. Oh, and to not give too much away, even the zero-G sections behave as you’d expect… no, really, it’s very well done indeed.
Click for larger imageIf you’re a chicken like me, legging it away and going to ground whilst the Koreans hurl masses of firepower after you will probably rank as one of your favourite gaming moments as the jungle disintegrates around you… If you ever wondered what it’d be like to be on the receiving end of that scene in Predator where they all just fired blindly into the jungle, then Crysis will show you. Sadly, it does highlight the lack of shredded leaves dropping down and it limited to certain sized branches but it’s still pretty impressive… even if the AI completely lose you after a few seconds…
Probably the most visceral display of the physics is when you kill an enemy… sure, they ragdoll, but it’s ragdolling with momentum. Shoot a fleeing NK in the back and he'll collapse face first into the dirt, his lifeless legs flipping up behind him a little as their momentum carries them on a bit. Bodies spin and fall as bullets hit them and though you’ll rarely see giblets flying and blood spraying, it’s possibly the most realistic recreation of shooting yet rendered in a game. Add in the superlative graphics and you almost feel sorry for the AI… almost.