Hard, fast and frantic

There's no pleasing some people, you know, and generally there's no pleasing gamers at all. Make a game too easy or too short, and they whinge; make it too hard or too long, and they'll still whinge. Crysis aims towards the latter, in my opinion, but do bare in mind that I'm fairly crap at FPS games. The two levels we tested (the opening Island map and a later Harbor one) took a good while to complete, even accounting for the fact that we were all trying to experiment as much as possible, for the sake of journalism (oh how we suffered for you, dear readers).

Unfortunately, some of the difficulty comes from a bit of a cheap trick: enemies suck up bullets like chubby kids in a sweet shop. You could stand almost point-blank with a Korean trooper and let him have a direct blast of a shotgun; he'd go down but he'd also get back up again. Err, hello? Even with body armor, he should be in no fit state to leap back up and starting running around. Now there is a simple solution, headshot the buggers, but that only works if you've either got the distance and time to plan the move out or you've the playing skills of a pro-gamer.

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

When you're facing up to ten soldiers at a time, this somewhat unbelievable level of human endurance makes it a frantic affair. Good fun, of course, but you're left with a feeling of "this just isn't fair" too often. Spraying sub-machine gun fire from just a few feet away should do something but more often than not, it just results in even more irate enemies. Perhaps this is nothing more than a clear indication of my gaming inadequacies but I wasn't the only person to observe this issue.

You can also forget about playing Rambo and running into an area, leaping around like Nureyev, guns akimbo. Crytek have made the game in such a way that one has to use the nano-suit features, and as frequently as possible. This is actually a good thing because it encourages you to think before moving - do I enable the cloak, sneak in slowly (because running will drain the energy very quickly) and lob a grenade or two into the masses? Or do I perform zippy speed bursts, nipping back and forth, picking them off one by one? Or do I super-jump my way to a higher location and nobble them with sniper fire?

The decisions are expanded by the fact that most of the weaponry can be altered with various add-ons: laser pointers, night lights, special rounds, telescopic sights, silencers and so on. And you really do need to plan it out beforehand; one can devise new paths and solutions once you're in a firefight but it requires so much finger-fiddling with the keyboard and mouse that it's not a preferable method.

Having said all that, though, there's immense satisfaction in clearing a level or finding a neat solution to a tight spot, packed with zealous enemies. Still here? Okay then, in four: hard, challenging and demanding.