Mid-Life Crysis

So I finally got around to playing around with Crysis. It seems all the hype that went into the game surely lived up, graphics-wise. One thing that did disappoint was the immense hardware needed to run the game in full-blast detail. I don't know if the game was simply unoptimized or that the drivers aren't exactly up to speed with the game yet. But even with three video cards working together, it still cannot handle 1920x1200 with all the bells and whistles attached. This could very well be a driver issue, or perhaps a API issue. But that's an entirely different matter here...

The game itself is amazingly detailed. I've managed to tinker around with a few settings and sure enough that documented trick of modifying some configuration files to force the highest detail settings to be accessible worked. Sadly, the toll it took on the system was too much. Choppy framerate and chugging performance made it not worth to use for now. For the single-player gameplay, I cannot find a single thing wrong with it, other than its AI. Never had I have so much fun picking enemies off through sniping in many ways. At first it was through a basic assault sight to assist with the aiming. Then came the assault scope attachment. Lastly, the sniper scope completed the package. It was truly a great run just finding various vantage points, hiding spots, and picking enemies off one by one.

Eventually I continued playing until I actually beat it. For a single-player game, it ain't all that bad. However, the worst part of having the game is very little replay value. Perhaps that is where the multi-player aspect comes in. But like any other FPS out there, you can only do so much. It is the sole reason why certain games being tailored for online play work so well to keep the gamers playing. There were a few sales here and there for Crysis, but none of which was heavily discounted to even lure me in to buying it. US$50 is a lot to ask for considering that the game itself was built well on single-player. And I highly doubt my clanmates would be jumping on to play the game in multi-player. If it was US$25, then maybe I would have picked it up. Well, maybe I'll pick it up when it comes down to that price range. By then, maybe we'll have hardwares truly capable of running the game to its fullest... without the heavy hit on framerate.