A highly detailed model of NanoSuit from Crysis 3 video gameIntense Game Play, Power Issues, and High Frame Rates Lead to Long Road for CrysisAfter a short swim with speed mode enabled, you emerge on the beach next to the outpost. You crouch behind a large rock and disable speed mode. You scan with your visor for enemy patrols you might have missed while your nanosuit recharges.
Eavesdropping on enemy soldiers’ small talk for clues, you miss the hostile on your eight. Initially frozen in wide-eyed disbelief, he snaps back to reality and starts shouting the equivalent of “A DEMON, A DEMON!” in Korean as you fumble to enable cloak mode.
Caught off guard, you set your suit to strength mode. With your nanosuit’s energy rapidly depleting and almost out of bullets, you react instinctively. As the North Korean starts shooting, the outpost alerted and a tank and two jeeps coming your way, you grab a turtle and throw it towards his face. You have him by the throat before he can realize what’s happened, launching him towards the barrels in the path of the incoming jeeps.
You’re a soldier. A predator. An unflinching hybrid killing machine.
In a quick one-two combo, you spend half of your remaining energy in maximum speed mode, jumping towards the tank. You switch mid-air to armor mode and land with a bang. You eliminate its driver, take control and give the enemies a taste of their own medicine amidst fiery carnage and panicked screams.
All at a glorious 10 frames per second.
This was Crysis on the day of release–a title that, over a decade later, remains as impressive as when we first met it. A game that many still can’t run properly on their computers. Crysis was both an open-world experience like no other and a meme that asked if your hardware was worthy of its magnificence.
On the surface, Crysis ain’t cyberpunk. It’s a science-fiction military shooter. It starts with Nomad, a soldier with a super-powered exoskeleton suit, investigating North Korea’s military presence on the fictional Lingshan Islands. Soon he’s trying to stop an alien invasion that started eons ago, before our hairy ancestors dropped from the banana trees they used to call home. You could safely say it’s more War of the Worlds than Johnny Mnemonic.
But that’s if you don’t dive into the specifics or look at the grand picture.
Warning: here be spoilers.
Crysis could very well take place in the same world as Blade Runner or the Deus Ex series. Its future doesn’t look bleak and dystopian, and it skips the mixing of crude hardware with flesh. Instead of placing the player among scum in dark and rainy cityscapes, it throws them in a lush jungle against military combatants and eventually, aliens.
As the story and action progress and even more so in the two sequels that followed, it asks the same questions as most greats in the cyberpunk genre: Can humans fuse with machines? When will that happen? What will define human nature? What makes us who we are? Is it our conscience? Our psyche? Our ghost?
All the while in the background, mega-corporations try to grab advanced tech to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors and control the masses.
