Upon hearing of Crysis' release of a remake for consoles, I immediately set it in my bucketlist of things to get; I had played the Crysis 2 Mulitplayer beta after already knowing of Crysis, so playing a single player representation of the Crysis series had huge appeal for me. A few months later, I can proudly say Crysis is in my collection of games.
Crysis takes play in the relatively near future, the year 2020. As such, the technology is vastly improved over its current state, with the Nanosuit that the main characters wear being a testament to that fact. The Nanosuit, which the player uses as the character "Nomad", is similar to most generic sci-fi power suits, although it takes its shape in some sort of body glove. There are four different modes for the suit to switch between, which are simplified to match the limited number of buttons on the Xbox controller: maximum strength, maximum speed, cloak, and maximum armor. Most of the abilities are melded within each other to make up for the lack of buttons, like strength jumping being mapped to holding the "A" button down on the controller. Unfortunately, as a side effect of this, strength mode is always turned on, making the player and all others equipped with a Nanosuit continuously glow red. Although not essentially game-breaking, it's still annoying when all of Raptor team is glowing bright red during a dramatic cutscene when they're obviously not supposed to.
Gameplay is Crysis is thankfully different from most first-person shooter; the game lets the player approach mission objective in any order they choose to, allowing the game to become somewhat of a sandbox shooter. Roaming around the fictional Lingshan Islands with Crysis' beautiful graphics is a giant relief from typical straight-forward shooters such as Call of Duty.
Also different is the sheer amount of weaponry and customizability of them thereof; the player can carry two primaries, a pistol (or dual-wielded pistols should the player find another), a missile launcher, remote detonated explosives, their fists, and an additional weapon at the end of the game (which would spoil the ending if I said...). While not necessarily part of the "carriable" armament the player can have, Crysis allows the player to pick up objects and hurl them wherever they desire with Nomad's Nanosuit-enhanced strength. Despite all these weapons, I still find it incredibly enjoyable to go around the island with my fists out Falco-punching every enemy I see, allowing the ragdoll physics to take over their bodies and make them fly away.
Can you tell the difference? Yeah, me neither
Crysis' technological feats are amazing even today five years after its initial release; buildings collapse, the lighting is otherworldly, and the in-game models are accurate representations of real life; however, being a console port of the superior PC version, some performance problems with framerate occur, along with a few low-res textures and shorter draw-distance; the game also lacks the PC version's multiplayer mode, meaning Xbox gamers are limited to the single player campaign.
The storyline in Crysis isn't overly amazing or overly original; the story seems to have been "inspired" by Halo in more than one area in the overall campaign structure. The player is somewhat of a super-tank, absorbing ridiculous amounts of fire at the same time. While making an archaeological dig, the scientists taken hostage by the enemy Korean government unearths a massive danger; this can be related to the Flood in Halo, which the enemy of that game, the Covenant, also finds deep within the world. The games also end in a similar way; without saying to much, it basically ends the same way with "we're not finished here, there's probably more", not unlike Halo 1's ending.
Despite a few minor issues and a somewhat generic story, Crysis remains a spectacular piece of work on the Xbox; the game is only $20 on the Xbox Live Arcade, which is practically a steal for anyone willing to wait the four hours to download it.
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