#21 – Crysis (PC)
I didn't see this one as my next finished game but here it is. Last weekend it was on sale on Steam in a $30 pack with Crysis Warhead. When Crysis was released two years ago it had the reputation for being a game with system requirements ahead of its time. Without spending an exorbitant amount of money, no desktop machine could run it on full detail at a decent framerate. I knew mine couldn't so I decided I'd wait till the day came when I could.
I'm proud to say Xerxes 3 handled it like a champ and it only suffered some slowdown during some very intense fights with the aliens at the end. The game, even by today's standards, is absolutely gorgeous. No game, except for maybe Far Cry 2, comes close to looking as good as Crysis. It is an absolute monument to PC gaming superiority.
The whole game is absolutely balls out insane. You run around in a nano-machine powered super-suit, killing North Koreans, blowing shit up, and then fighting off aliens. It ramps up from sneaking around in the jungle, escaping patrols, to assaulting enemy fighting positions and rolling through their battlespace in tanks, to grabbing some sci-fi weaponry and blasting aliens. It just gets more and more intense as it goes along. I've read a lot of complaints about the last sections of the game, in which you're fighting just aliens, as being boring and too straightforward. Straightforward yes, but definitely not boring. It just happens to be a rather sudden shift from sneaking and scouting to running and gunning.
I've got Crysis Warhead queued up and downloading. I'm going to be playing more Left 4 Dead 2 in the meantime, and maybe finish Borderlands.