Crysis Review

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jan 23, 2008

Filed under: Links 39 comments

I was sent a link to an interesting article. It was on one of those sites that don’t offer a “back to the main page” link. I wanted to see what other stuff the website might have to offer, so I just started URL bashing. I never did find the front page of the site, but while browsing around the directory (note to webmasters: you really should turn off directory browsing or use default documents) I stumbled on a couple of gems.

This is probably the best game review I’ve read in ages. It tells you everything you need to know about Crysis. It’s pretty much what I expected. It’s Far Cry with More Better graphics, which is odd because I don’t think the graphics in Far Cry needed any work. The gameplay did. “Try to sneak up on a group of heavily armed, poorly voiced soldiers with telescopic eyesight and advanced paranoia, who all have nothing better to do than to peer into the jungle ceaslessly and shoot anything that moves.” Whee. The game has its fans, but I am not among them. I cheated my way through Far Cry and found that the game felt more like work than anything else.

Looks like Crysis is Far Cry, only more so. Still, the review was fun to read. I like the comic-book style approach. I’d be tempted to do the same thing, but the bandwidth costs would muder me.

On that same site I also found this gigantic, wonderfully drawn montage of videogames characters from the last 20 years. (Mildly NSFW.)

 


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39 thoughts on “Crysis Review

  1. Darin says:

    Cool picture, but ya might want to put a NSFW tag on it. I wasn’t offended, but it would definitely get me fired if I’d browsed it at work and been caught.

  2. SimeSublime says:

    Brilliant poster. Too bad it’s in Russian. Oh well.

  3. Studoku says:

    I’ve seen that poster before. The version I saw didn’t have the labels though.

  4. Adam says:

    That was an awsome review.

  5. Avaz says:

    Can we get a translated version perhaps? I first thought the signs were gibberish.. then I recognized it as Russian. That’s when I figured maybe it would make more sense if we knew what it was saying.
    Plus, I’m sure the Web Hive Mind can gather and figure out those dozen or so that are label-less.

  6. Xiphos says:

    I think the big Orangutan is from Black & White, while the little alien dude may be from Destroy All Humans.

  7. Divra says:

    Brilliant, all of it. I agree with Darin about the NSFW tag, though.

  8. gahaz says:

    The Crysis review is absolutely clever! Its also the most honest review I have seen. Most are along the lines of “MY GOD IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL AND THE MODELING IS SO RIGHTEOUS AND MY EYES BLED! anditskindaaveragegameplay MY GOD DID YOU SEE THE TEXTURES ON THAT ALIEN!”

  9. Neil says:

    The man and woman in the lower-left are George and Nico from the Broken Sword series.

    Pretty sure the ballerina swashbuckler at the top is from Sid Meier’s Pirates, a reference to the interminable ballroom dancing scenes.

  10. k3rni says:

    I’ll take an easy one. The cavemen in a wooden flying machine (top left, generally) are from “Ugh!”, a game where you did exactly that – taxi around cavemen in a wooden foot-powered flying machine.

  11. khorboth says:

    For amusing/accurate reviews, I have to vote for Yahtzee of Escapist Magazine.
    His Crysis review is at:
    http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/2808-Zero-Punctuation-Crysis

    Caution: Flash video, NSFW for language, mature topics.

  12. Hermes says:

    Cool site. Does it actually have a homepage?

  13. Phlux says:

    Yeah, that pretty well sums it up. Crysis was pretty much too short, too expensive, too graphically intensive and too average to earn the 95+ metascore it’s gotten.

    The nanosuit was pretty much their only “innovative” gameplay feature, and it’s not even that original.

    Halo does the regenerative health thing

    Halo 2 also does the regenerative cloak thing

    Half Life did the regenerative sprinting power (crysis just turns the speed up to 11)
    as does any game with a “stamina” bar.

    Fantastic strength and jumping abilities harken back even before the days of Mario.

    Combining all of these on a wheel where you can pick from one or the other provides for some fun, but it’s not enough to base an entire game on. The rest is pure shooter.

  14. Ferrous Buller says:

    I wish more reviews were that tongue-in-cheek. Jeremy Parish at 1UP has done some fun ones: Cooking Mama Cook Off! and We Love Katamari are the two I can recall.

  15. Namfoodle says:

    That review was hilarious. It’s a really great format for reviewing games (and deflating the over-hype).

    I’m glad I was able to get some entertainment from the snarky review of the game, as I’m unlikely to every own a system that could run it unless I will the lottery.

  16. Downtym says:

    Most likely that directory is stuff that is linked to by the user from http://www.planetcrap.com/ . Most likely this guy (person?): http://www.planetcrap.com/users/35/

    I have a few directories that are browseable on my webspace. They serve as open places for me to dump humorous images and just link to. Since almost the entirety of the directory is made up of WoW images, I think locking it down to browsing would defeat the purpose of showing my insanity off to the world.

    http://www.kommy.net/~downtym/images/wow/

  17. Dreamer says:

    The only one I recognize is the four sword-wielding people all stuck together, heralding back to Heroes of Might and Magic. Some of the heads even look vaguely familiar…

  18. k3rni says:

    And the blocky-headed character otherwise made from ellipsoids, left of Shub-Niggurath, is the main hero of Ecstatica. Needed help from Gamespot’s list to pop this name out of my memory :)

  19. Rustybadger says:

    Ah, Far Cry. I’m with Shamus. If it hadn’t been for cheat codes, I’d have dropped it out of sheer boredom and never seen the anticlimactic ending. Multiplayer is a lot of fun though; like the boys at the ESRB say: “Game Experience May Change During Online Play”. And it’s a damn good thing, too.

    I also don’t think I’d spend the denarii to upgrade my system for this game. COD4, perhaps. I have to build another station for BF2 LAN parties anyhow, so might as well pimp it out. *sigh*

  20. Kazeite says:

    Ah – the guy with the scythe, next to the Dungeon Keeper, is Patrick Galloway, hero of the Clive Barker’s Undying.

    Also, I was told that guy with the cat, staring at Kilrathi, is from Postal 2.

    Oh, and there’s also guy brom BioForge next to Crusader: No Remorse and Z guy. Heh, he’s still wielding that blue arm :)

    And I’m thoroughly surprised that no-one has quessed that Grey holding a globe with red dots, (next to the Evil Genius guy) is from UFO:Enemy Unknown :)

    Aand, the guy with Tommy gun, to the right of UGH guys, is probably from Mafia: City of the Lost Angels.

  21. RandomGuy says:

    that poster thing is cool and I noticed something else on the poster, I think the dead green thing next to space quest is an orc from warhammer 40,000:dawn of war.

  22. Kennet says:

    I also think the jester marked as Pandemonium is actually Malcolm from the Kyrandia games, but I don’t know Pandemonium that well, so I might be wrong.

  23. Chevluh says:

    The guy selling (or begging for?) mecha parts is an agent from Syndicate wars

    The two who broke that Warcraft dude’s sword are the two heroes of Broken Sword (in theit broken sword 3 version).

    The firemen are Ultima 8’s Avatar (and mimics?) and the guy on fire is Richard Garriott as he disguised himself for interviews around U7-U8 time.

    the four attached swordsmen are the team from Might and Magic 6, not people from HoMM. the HoMM homage is the little knight looking at a pile of poop.

    To the left is Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 being held at gunpoint by the barbarian from Severance. further left the pile of bodies includes a warhammer 40K ork and the two heroes from Gobliins 2.

    The guy juggling behind purple tentacle is the Dark savant from Wizardry. Before the Evil Genius guy, from right to left, you can find a sectoà¯d from X-Com (holding the gamescape), Malcolm from Legend of Kyrandia (mistakenly labeled as beign from Pandemonium) and Scotia from Lands of Lore.

    Plus a pig cop from Duke Nukem between the Beyond Good and Evil characters.

    phew, that’s all for me!

  24. Chevluh says:

    Oh hey, the guy with all the bolts is the guy from Stalker-the-game, and one of the bolts has a bandage attached just like stalker-the-movie.

  25. guy says:

    i’m not sure about the sectiod. wrong head shape, for one thing. also, the globe looks unlike the gamescape. X-com seems to have been left off the list for some reason, as i don’t see an aquatiod or anthropod, who are equivilent aliens from the other two games of the series.

    I just rolled a one on my saving throw verus nerd, didn’t i?

    EDIT: dudes, the leftmost guy in that frame is Cthullu. did you really miss THAT?

  26. WoodenTable says:

    The tiny mammoths are from Syberia, I believe. That’s definitely the main character Kate winding them up in the top-right corner.

  27. Blurr says:

    It’s worth reading through the review twice. Only on the second time did I notice the “Turn signals” and the extensions that he was giving the videos in the second panel. I need to do that.

  28. Blurr says:

    Wow. This wavatar is awesome.

  29. NobleBear says:

    @ khorboth: +1, Yahtzee is awesome.

    I tried playing FarCry over at a buddies house once; got frustrated with the gameplay and found out that there wasn’t even any real story, so I put it down and never looked back.

  30. LightWarden says:

    Well, seems as though a few of you guys got most of the ones I was going to point out, but here’s a few more:
    -The man and the woman running from the mafia member are Brian and Gina from the adventure game series “Runaway”
    -I’m pretty sure that the woman working as a secretary for Cthulu is Hecubah, the primary antagonist from Westwood’s Nox RPG

    Come nerds, let us press the attack!

  31. Zaxares says:

    You know you’re a die-hard gaming geek when you recognise more than 80% of the characters on that montage. O.o

    Still a great picture though. Oh, and does anybody know the meaning of the little clockwork elephants scattered throughout the picture?

  32. Daosus says:

    The Russian signs are random (sometimes funny) comments. They do not identify the people they’re next to.

    On another note, great find on the review. 3D graphics has kind of killed video games :(

  33. Phlux says:

    Zaxares: What does it say about you when not only do you recognize 80% of the characters, but own probably 60% of those games, and have played another 30% of them at some point.

    I think it says I need to get a life.

  34. locusts says:

    The guy at the top with the “No more Wind” sign is a dark elf in bonemold armor from Morrowind.

  35. Chevluh says:

    I just realized the middle “ugh!” caveman’s helmet and cigarette pack are from Cannon fodder.

  36. Dirty Dan says:

    I don’t know any Russian, but thanks to Greek I recognize a lot of Cyrillic letters. From what I can tell, the Prince of Persia is saying “phuch”, which is probably a Cyrillicization of a certain English word. There’s an even better-labeled version here.

  37. LintMan says:

    I didn’t think Crysis was anywhere near worthy of all the slobbering that assorted reviewers did over it, but it was OK. I didn’t care much at all for Far Cry, but IMHO Crysis is a much better game then that, though the semi-omniscient AI is annoyingly the same.

    I was surprised about the review’s vehicle comments. I didn’t have much problem with the humvees, but I thought the whole VTOL segment was utter cr*p. Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation Crysis review captures my sentiments on that pretty well.

    Like I said, it’s not a bad game, and I probably would have liked it a whole lot more if the game didn’t go downhill so quickly in the final third of the game (from the spaceship on).

  38. Plasma says:

    “Combining all of these on a wheel where you can pick from one or the other…”

    …sounds like something Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight did a decade ago!
    But then, I like to spontaneously spout my kooky crackpot opinion that the Jedi Knight games are the best FPSes ever at any opportunity.
    This zany opinion is fueled mostly by my need to clearly see exactly where all the shots from all my weapons go, my need to be allowed to always take a third-person view behind my character, and the ability to Force Grip, Force Push, kick, and in some cases Force Pull people off ledges (a well-established trope in the movies, too!) without having to really fight them at all.

    FPSes aren’t really my scene, anyway. I’m not going to buy another one until the next Jedi Knight game comes out. RTSes are more my style. Also City of Heroes/Villains, which possesses several key similarities to the JK series (most notably the ability to super jump, super speed, and otherwise be able to actually move instead of plodding at a snail’s pace through the world).

    I’m done babbling now, you may return to your regularly scheduled conversation.

  39. Squash says:

    “I like the comic-book style approach. I'd be tempted to do the same thing, but the bandwidth costs would muder me.”

    I assume you’re joking, or have you pulled DMOTR?

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