In the year 2020, a group of U.S. archaeologists working on the Lingshan Islands in the Philippines Sea get taken hostage by the North Korean army. It’s been one week since the distress call, which suggested the science team had stumbled onto something important. Since then, no one has heard from them. As a Delta Force Lieutenant code-named Nomad, you and your squad are sent in to find out exactly what’s going on.

The game opens impressively, with you and your team getting air-dropped over the Lingshan Islands. You are specialist soldiers, equipped with state-of-the-art nanosuits that can boost your strength and speed, harden to stop bullets, or even make you nigh-invisible for short periods of time. For you though, the mission could have started better.

As you are falling you see a bright light quickly flash by, before you realise that your parachute isn’t working. Fortunately, you manage to land in the water, but as your scattered team starts working on getting back together, it quickly becomes apparent that the situation is worse than anyone imagined.

Crysis is German developer Crytek’s second game, following the success of their 2004 hit Far Cry. Several of the features that made Far Cry popular also return here, such as stunning graphics, and a rather open, sandbox-style FPS adventure.

From the onset of the game you will be given objectives, and your map display will indicate where you should be heading, but the island is a big place, and in what manner you move around and from which direction you approach is up to you. This, coupled with the variety offered by the nanosuit, makes Crysis suitable for several playstyles.

When you are sent to investigate a North Korean-occupied village for instance, you can take your time and circle around towards the back while using your suit’s stealth function to try and slip in unnoticed; or you can drive a machine gun-equipped jeep up to the front barricade and let loose on everything that moves.

Your weaponry can also be modified on the fly to suit your approach. You can add silencers at the cost of reduced damage, or put on a flashlight that might help you make your way around, but will also more easily alert enemies to your presence.

The game will become somewhat more streamlined toward the second half, as the storyline comes more into focus. Still, a mission will rarely put a clock on you or tell you how you should accomplish a particular objective; and these are good things, especially early on, as there are a lot of great sights to see.

In fact, Crysis might well be the best-looking game ever made, on any platform, which would be no mean feat considering the level of competition. The island surroundings are inviting, borderline photorealistic, and seeing the Sun rise for the first time over lazily swaying palm trees can do a lot to put you in Nomad’s shoes. The game world also comes with a full physics system and day/night cycles.

The extremely advanced graphics can be something of a mixed blessing though. If you visit a Crysis forum, you will notice that almost all the threads concern one single topic: whether or not people’s hardware are up to the job.

The game’s features, story and action all get pushed to the side in favour of the worry that a certain computer might not be enough to deliver a satisfying game experience. To a certain extent, Crysis then becomes a way of showing off just how cool your rig is rather than a game admired and discussed for its own merits.

From another point of view, the large, seemingly-alive world of Crysis also appears full of untapped potential. You have a beautiful setting and a realistic physics system, but all you can do with it is blow things up and kill people. It can be satisfying to see palm trees crack and topple to your machinegun fire, or power-jump onto a shack only to have the roof collapse and drop you inside the building; but we find ourselves missing more immersive elements.

With a dose of, say, Metal Gear Solid added, you could be able to climb trees, utilize camouflage and hunt animals for your survival in the jungle. The world, rather than just a beautiful scene for destruction, would become an active part of the game mechanics.

Though it may not sound quite as spectacular as it looks, the audio of Crysis is by no means bad. Explosions and weapons fire are loud and satisfying, the jungle has a lot of ambient atmospheric sounds and noises; and from time to time the island itself will seem to groan and rumble, as if trying to warn you from pressing on. The soundtrack is also well designed, and makes the game sound and feel a lot like a Hollywood blockbuster.

The combat mechanics work well and feel mostly realistic. Enemies will use cover and support each other, often lobbing grenades and laying down suppressive fire while closing in on you. If you get spotted by a patrol that you can’t eliminate in a timely fashion, there’s also a high risk of them calling for backup; which usually means additional troops and vehicles heading your way very soon.

On the downside, the hit localization system is pretty basic for such an advanced game, divided into head and body shots. You can’t drop an enemy to the ground by shooting him in the leg, nor interfere with his shooting by aiming for the arms.

Virtually all enemy soldiers will also wear plenty of body armour, so a head shot can save you both time and ammunition; though many times you will find your first shot only serves to knock off a helmet, leaving your foe surprised but unharmed.

Completing Crysis takes around 10 hours if you play it straightforwardly, whereas going out of your way to be stealthy and eliminate every single enemy could make the game last a few hours more. As you progress through missions, the action will keep ramping up.

From the early goings-on of legging it through the jungle you will find yourself taking down enemy helicopters, blasting your way across a war-torn valley in a tank; and ultimately getting to the bottom of just what it was that the archaeological team discovered, something that will have dire consequences for everyone on the island.

The only real low point is a vehicular mission in the later part of the game, where you have to pilot an extremely unwieldy VTOL aircraft. Struggling even to stay off the ground, you are faced with enemies much faster and more maneuverable than yourself in a match-up that feels a lot like chasing fighter jets with a zeppelin.

Thus you will spend the majority of this mission at their mercy, to a point where we often felt that we only survived because of questionable AI and an uncharacteristic lack of enemy aggression. Fortunately, the action picks up in the very last chapter to deliver a truly epic, if yet incomplete, finale.

In the end, Crysis is a very ambitious and occasionally very good game. It can really shine in certain moments, but can as a whole also serve as a reminder of the old gaming adage that graphics aren’t everything; especially when they end up being the quality overshadowing everything else. If you have any kind of liking for shooters though, as well as a near top-of-the-line computer that can handle it, you should most definitely give Crysis a go.