Size zero looks

Ahhhh, the gentle splash of waves, the hypnotic call of sea birds and the splat-splat-splat of machine gun fire. Lush.

It has to be said that, on face value, there is little else to the gameplay. Each level is divided into a sequence of specific goals and sub-tasks to be completed, where the primary objective is to kill anything that moves and speaks back to you in funny lingo. Of course, Crysis is a first person shooter, so there's nothing else that one should expect. There are no RPG or turn-based strategy elements, just hordes of fanatical Far Eastern nutters and extraterrestrial things, all hell bent on embedding high velocity chunks of metal into your cranium.

So why all the hype? FPS games are ten-a-penny these days and there has been some pretty stiff opposition this year. The magic card that Crysis has shoved up its sleeve is graphics. Now I fully understand and appreciate the spittle-flying rants from some folk of how games have been looks over content for far too long, but for this game at least, they're a key part of what makes this an AAA title.

We played the DX9 version of Crysis, with all of the settings put to "High" (more of why they couldn't be put higher later) at 1680 x 1050, and it's astonishingly good looking. Take the process of environment destruction: enemies will often try to take cover in huts, shacks or behind ubiquitous barrels and crates. No problem; just shoot the crap out of it (or lob a grenade in there) and remove their cover. You can do it piecemeal or wholesale, but either way, the combination of shaders, particles and physics making it tumble and collapse look akin to a waif-like model, slinking up and down a catwalk, rather than a mere rendering procedure.

A higher resolution version of this clip can be found here.

On these settings, the shadowing is crisp and convincing, and especially good at giving the positions of NPCs away. The surface of the sea rolls about, deformed in real time, and quick dip reveals light beams, caustics, refraction - a physicist's dream. The levels are not static sandboxes to stomp about in either: time moves on, dragging the Earth around with it, and missions can start at night but finish in the day. Reactive and mobile flora and fauna serve as the icing on the already sweet cake.

Perhaps the two most notable effects are depth of field and motion blur. The former is caused by the camera focusing on a particular object, leaving the rest in one's peripheral vision. Previous attempts in other games have been, to be frank, bloody awful with them rendering everything at a certain distance from the camera in Fuzz-o-Vision. With Crysis, it feels so natural that I didn't actually notice it for about 30 minutes of playing (and when I did, I became so preoccupied with testing it out, that I forgot to notice the heavily armed North Korean camp, bang in line with the direction I was walking in).

Rocket launchers are very useful - now then, who can I kill?

Start a level during the night but take your time, and you watch the Sun rise.

Motion blur is another trick that's been done in the past, to varying degrees of success, but it works well here: whipping the camera around, rather than tracking it slowly, induces the aforementioned trick. It's not quite as spiffy as the depth of field effect (which is glorious after a nearby shell impact) but within a short time, you get used it to the point that it feels irkesome without it.

Intermediate attention span deficient readers: it looks fecking awesome.