computer... or old computer, or calculator or pinball control, or really anything at

all because that's more of a punch line than a serious question these days. But

10 years ago whether or not something ran Crysis was a legit inquiry, and for

good reason: nothing ran Crysis! At least, nothing ran

Crysis to its full potential. When it launched for Windows PCs on November 13.

2007. Crytek's new game was an unparalleled juggernaut of graphical

fidelity and forward-thinking tech. Under the hood was CryEngine 2, an engine that

was uninterested in only being the most impressive in 2007. Nope, it sought to be

the most impressive for years to come. Crysis was so hard to run that even the

best graphics cards of its day were unable to smoothly play it maxed out.

Your best-case scenario was using something like the 768MB nVidia

GeForce 8800 Ultra, which at the time was the fastest single card solution on the

market and cost over 800 US dollars. But even this beast could only crank out seven

frames per second on the very highest settings! And while it was one of the few

that could get into the 20s at lower resolutions, several competing cards on

the market couldn't even render enough frames to count. So when this game was

new there was no one playing it with all the bells and whistles *and* a decent

framerate, because it simply wasn't possible yet. Whether this was due to

ballsily ambitious design, bad optimization, or a combination of both,

the result was that Crysis was the go to game for benchmarking purposes over

the next several years. And any time a new GPU came out to the question was

inevitable: "Can it run Crysis?" But Crysis was more than just a glorified benchmark

or a graphics snob tech demo. I mean, it was those things, no doubt, but it was

also a shooter worth playing in its own right. I remember downloading the demo

and being absolutely hooked from the beginning because it felt like a

spiritual successor to Crytek's previous game, Far Cry, just with way more detail,

improved combat, and much more environmental interaction. Of course it

looked and ran like day-old dookie on my system but due to the stealth meets

action FPS gameplay and the infinitely variable

physics sandbox, it was an intoxicating combo I couldn't resist.

So when the full game was out I was all too happy to grab a copy, free it from

its cellophane prison, and pop the DVD into my Windows Vista rig knowing all

too well that I would not be able to fully enjoy all its features yet.

Thankfully today it's no problem to run Crysis on even a half-decent PC so for

the rest of this video we'll be fulfilling my 2007 fantasies and be

enjoying Crysis on a machine that can actually run Crysis. Crysis begins with

logos, brand deals, animations, notices, copyrights, and finally a very green main

menu. And before we do anything else it is Crysis tradition to jump straight

into the graphics options because there are a lot of options to optionally

optionate here. And this was built to use DirectX 9 for the most part. DirectX 10

was available, and it had some graphics options for that as long as you had

Windows Vista. Or at least that was the idea since it turned out you could

activate a lot of the DirectX 10 features through tweaking some files and

get many of the DX10 options in 9. They didn't all work perfectly but they were

there. Once you have all that sorted it's time to get onto the game itself and

it comes in single-player and multiplayer flavors. Eh, the multiplayer

was there on launch at least. It has since been disabled after the GameSpy

servers shut down some years ago. There are some fan patches for getting online

multiplayer to work since the publisher, Electronic Arts, never patched it. But

good luck finding a match on a whim, you're probably gonna have to wait

around for a special event of some kind, or just get on a local network and play

in classic LAN mode if you happen to know... "real people." We're just gonna be

sticking to single-player for the most part in this video though. The game

really comes alive on the harder difficulty modes, I do recommend playing

them. It's rather fascinating what it does with the hardest one - disabling

not just a crosshair but making the enemies speak their own native language,

and not English. After that you get a pre-rendered but rather pointless intro.

Just a trailer for the game that you're seconds away from playing, I'm not really

sure what the point of this is. After this though is a scene rendered in real

time that is a little bit more useful, introducing you to the

main characters: a US Special Forces group known as the Raptor Team. Mm how machismo.

After this you're literally tossed into

the game world where you play Nomad, also known as Military McBoringSoldier. He's

not a silent protagonist but he may as well be with how empty of a vessel he is.

Anyway, due to some unknown interference you lose control of your chute and

miss the landing zone entirely, dropping you into the ocean temporarily

losing your powers so you can get reacquainted with them. And from here

you're given an effective but unusually dark tutorial. I don't mean that tonally,

I mean like, it's just dark, it's hard to see stuff. Crytek could have easily blown

their wad from the very beginning if they chose to. But they didn't, instead

choosing to reveal the true splendor of the environment and the lighting and

everything until after you're familiar with the mechanics. Once you do get

through all that though you get the full daytime reveal and wow: look at all the...

everything! This was mighty impressive back then. Honestly it still looks pretty

good. Although it looked more like this when I first played it, and it was

probably the same for many of you too that's just -- hehe -- that's just how it was.

Yeah, seeing this huge island set before you it just seemed like anything was

possible! But it's worth noting that Crysis is not an open-world game but

more of a series of large instanced zones taking place across a huge map. You

don't really run into invisible walls so much as you do... creative ways to try and

limit you from going outside the mission area one way or another...

*EXPLOSION*

The story takes place on the fictional Lingshan Islands in the Pacific Ocean

which has been subjected to a hostile takeover by North Korean armed forces mm,

compromising American archaeologists along the way. And that is why you, a

group of US special elite soldier dudes, are going there to try to evacuate them.

That's the main mission at least but along the way there's all sorts of side things

that keep coming up, and the result is that you're gonna be shooting a lot of

dudes. Not to mention messing around with the

environment! The level of physicality going on was pretty unprecedented at the

time. You can pick up and interact with hundreds of objects that would otherwise

just be static details, including bottles, and fruits, and animals, man. Yeah you can

pick up animals, why not; throw a chicken at a guy,

it's not gonna do anything but you can do it!

*chicken and shooting noises*

You can also use explosives to demolish buildings and

vehicles in spectacular fashion

*buildings and vehicles exploding spectacularly*

and cut foliage into little pieces using a spray of bullets, or punch down trees a

couple years before Minecraft made that popular. Hehe, "poplar."

Or take the slow and more quiet route by going invisible with silenced weaponry. Yes you are equipped

with a Nanosuit which can augment your armor, strength, speed, and stealth. And

you're presented with a wide range of weapons including pistols, shotguns,

rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, remote explosives, gauss guns and even

some sci-fi stuff! Most of which have alternate fire modes of varying types.

And each weapon can be customized on the fly with upgrades you loot off of

enemies: suppressors, sights, scopes, magazines, lighting options, sleep darts,

grenade launchers, and more. You want a 10x sniper scope on a 12 gauge or a

laser sight on a minigun? It's absurd and it lets you do it so why not!

This leads to an arsenal that is constantly evolving, keeping the game

feeling fresh. Combined with the suit abilities and the environment often

falling apart around you in chaotic fashion, and each playthrough can feel

quite unique. This combination of stuff was just so

cool to me back then. I hadn't seen this kind of weapon customization, especially

on the fly, and not hidden away in some kind of menu. It just made the whole

thing feel more organic like it was constantly changing at any time due to

random pickups. There are also quite a few vehicles to hop inside, many of which

have their own set of weapons. You got things like boats and trucks, APCs,

and VTOLS, and just all sorts of things litter the map. And for some reason

everything has nitrous, even pickup trucks and boats. So I always just

assumed the North Koreans hired Dominic Toretto to design their vehicles. Now, as

for the story itself... well, slight spoiler alert maybe?

You probably gotta know this by now: it's aliens! It's always aliens in

these kind of games. While there's plenty of crazy crap happening in the first

half of the game due to the North Korean army, the latter half of the game is

pretty much all aliens. Rather cold, squid-like aliens who gradually litter

the island with more snow and tentacles than a Frosty the Snowman hentai. As to

whether or not this all comes together effectively, well, I've seen it said that

Crysis begins as a great game, then becomes a bad game,

before finally turning into a good game by the end of the campaign. And you know

what, I somewhat agree with that. When Crysis is at its best you're sneaking

through forests scouting out enemy bases and more or less role-playing as the

Predator, executing a plan of assault with what feels like an infinite number

of gameplay outcomes. But when Crysis is at its worst you're on a far more linear

path blasting through swarms of soldiers with eagle vision and aliens with cheap

attacks that just aren't satisfying to kill. Although I admit, being able to grab

the smaller ones and just punching them into submission, that's pretty sweet, but other

than that they're just annoying. Then there are these zero gravity levels

which, yeah. I can take or leave. It's often confusing to navigate in this mode

and there's almost zero opportunity to use the tactics that you've learned up

to this point. I guess that's kind of the purpose of an extraterrestrial vessel:

levels just there to mix things up, and it achieves that. And I remember being in

awe of the awesome alien ship design back in 2007. This is just such a cool

thing to explore, especially in such high detail. However, as back and forth as I go

with these zero-g levels, the VTOL stuff after that? Screw that completely. it's

awkward to control, with a mouse and keyboard especially, and your ship is

made of aluminum foil or something, making for far too many sudden deaths

and quicksave spamming. Especially when the random tornadoes show up, alongside

bundles of enemies taking random potshots. Still, despite it being a kind

of an up-and-down experience, I think Crysis is lots of fun even ten years

later. At least in the levels where it gives you free rein to approach each

situation how you want to by experimenting with tactics, physics,

abilities, and customized weapons. Still kind of sucks that the protagonist is

about as interesting as a bucket of sand, I'd rather play anyone else on the team.

And it seems Crytek knew this because the next game in the series was Crysis

Warhead in 2008, a standalone expansion pack where you played your teammate,

Jason Statham -- I mean -- Psycho!

*Psycho Statham speaking*

Psycho's story parallels

that of Nomad's in Crysis, which makes sense seeing as Psycho frequently

went off to completely different parts of the island during that campaign. The

single-player story here is about half as long as the original game's 12 or so

hour campaign, but the new weapons, improvements to the AI, and a protagonist

with an actual personality make it worth playing if you liked the main game. Also

introduced with this was an extra disc called Crysis Wars, a standalone

multiplayer version of Crysis Warhead with several new modes and balancing

tweaks. Then in October of 2011, several months after Crysis 2 was already out,

they released Crysis for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. And it made sense

seeing as they'd already made a console-friendly engine for Crysis 2. So they

used the tech to bring over the original game. It was mighty impressive

considering what they had to work with in terms of hardware, and they even took

the chance to remove those crappy VTOL levels entirely because of the player

backlash four years prior. Anyway that's pretty much it for what I want to talk

about in this video regarding the original Crysis a decade later. I would

still heartily recommend giving Crysis a shot, especially on PC where it still

looks and plays pretty nicely on a modern machine. Sure, it's no longer the

cutting-edge graphical powerhouse it used to be, but that's fine!

The gameplay still holds up for the most part and its experience of stealthy

action gameplay with a crazy interactive environment holds up pretty well. It's an

engaging feeling of an open-world FPS without relying on open-world FPS tropes

that we see so often nowadays: like obnoxious amounts of trite collectibles,

radio towers, territory takeovers, arbitrary crafting, and randomly

generated encounters to pad out the game length. That stuff isn't here and it

doesn't need to be and it's better for it, I think. It's a scripted single-player

shooter that plays it straight while still providing a satisfying feeling of

open-ended possibilities and player experimentation. And you can now get