Today was a good day to play Crysis. The good news is (well, for me at least) that I got to try something other than shooting at a bunch of foliage with a powerful gun. Granted, I have absolutely nothing again shooting at palm trees with a mini gun, but there's only so much fun you can have with plant mutilation.

So what did I get to try?

I played Crysis in a 32-player multiplayer match. Of course, we played on a jungle map, but still, the action was a lot different from the single-player game.

I started out as "the science guy." I have no idea what that faction is, but I think I was fighting US Marines on the other side. Since I had to track across a lot of land and water to even get to where the action was taking place, I concentrated more on the graphical splendor that Crysis has to offer.

Funny thing though, the machine that I sat down to play on crashed some time before, so the EA guy had to restart the game. I sat down to play when the bar was at around 90 percent. The guy tells me: "please, sir, wait a minute for the game to load," and I'm like "yeah, OK." Turns out that it's right what they say about the Germans - they are very punctual and literal. He meant wait-one-minute. It took the game more than a minute I think to load the remaining 10 percent of the level.

Once I was finally in the game, the machine with two gigs of RAM on it, choked at every single new part of the map that was loading. I started out in what looked like a boat or some sort of sea vessel; seconds before I jumped into the water, the game froze, and the freezing and lagging continued throughout my game.

What this tells me is not that the game is poorly optimized; rather that they are either running it on pretty crap systems or that Crysis is quite simply a DX 10 game that you'll be able to play at decent frame rates when DX 10 cards become a standard.

Graphically though, the game looked absolutely amazing. About the best visual effect in the game by far are the volumetric clouds. I've never seen clouds look so awesome and so real in a video game. When I dove into the water, I was greeted to an incredible sight of the sea bed, and swimming back up to the surface, the moment that I emerged from the water, some of it was still streaming down my visor on the helmet. This looked goddamn amazing.

The rest of the environments felt like pretty standard Crysis stuff - loads of trees, grass and bushes and military base interiors.

Another cool effect that was clearly tweaked from the E3 demonstration is the use of the blur effect to show rapid movement and to just add a lot more flair to the action. This all may seem a bit redundant in a multiplayer game, but it was still fun to see.

And so I swam through the water, managed to infiltrate the enemy base, did my best to cunningly sneak around the place with my side arm before some bastard brought me down with a sniper rifle.

Oh well, at least I got to enjoy the scenery. And there's plenty of scenery to enjoy in Crysis.

-- Uros '2Lions' Jojic

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