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Crysis

With just one month to go until release, nearly all video games are in their final stages of bug testing, which means any preview of the gameplay, controls, graphics, etc are going to be as close to the final version as possible, without actually buying the game. This week, Crytek held their final preview session for a small number of European journalists and we were lucky to be a part of that crowd. The plan for the day was simple: go to the event, listen to some talks by Crytek, play the single and multiplayer games, ask some questions, go home. Better still, there was no funky clauses or embargoes and the like; the was a "straight up" play test of the most anticipated game this year. But where to start?

How about some facts and stats for the nerds? Over a million lines of code; 7GB of raw in-game data, 1GB of which is textures; up to 2 million polygons per scene; 150 times more complexity than Crytek's first work of digital art (Dinosaur Island). But let's face it, we can all bandy numbers around and stand in awe, drooling slightly for no reason, but it would be for naught if the game was a stinky pile of poo. Fortunately, it's not, and by a long way too. For the attention span deficient readers amongst you, here's the four word preview: Far Cry on steroids. Now if you want to know more, a lot more, then you'll need to be a bit patient and let me address various things, one by one.

The background story to the single player game is standard fare: unique combat troopers, equipped with the latest gear sporting nanotechnology (more of this in a moment or two), land on a remote island to deal with North Korean troops... for some reason that I forgot to pay attention to during the briefings (now who's deficient in attention span?).

During the opening sequence to the first level, you soon realise that all is not well in paradise: cue death screams across radio chatter, buddies going missing and weird stuff happening to you and - bingo! You're in the game. Little was actually said about the whole story but we all know that aliens are involved at some point in the game, which look suspiciously like the flying robotic octopuses from The Matrix films.

So far, this all sounds just a mite too similar to Far Cry: replace aliens with Trigens, special ops troopers with... umm... an ex-special ops trooper and oh. There's nothing else to change! Well that's not entirely true because of this nanotechnolog malarky I mentioned above.

These super-soldiers wear a "nano suit" (looking like a metallic version of the human musculature system), which can boost various aspects of the wearer's abilities such as strength, speed and level of optical transparency, better known as invisibility. Such powers are sourced from a limited amount of suit energy and depending on what action is performed, the energy drains away with usage. Shame really, because this power source also provides one's personal shields.

Oooh, I hear you cry, tactics! Yup - but more of that later.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GraphicsPage 3: GameplayPage 4: MultiplayerPage 5: Hardware RequirementsPage 6: Final Thoughts

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