Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

When I was in high school, I had to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a great horror book about the story of one person that has two distinct personalities depending on the time of the day. With Crysis, you get the same feeling, as the game starts as a design piece on how to make an open world feel real and believable, only meet its other personality, which plays out as a standard first person shooter experience. It is an enjoyable experience, but you know that with some touch up work, it could have been so much more.

In Crysis, you play as Nomad, one member of a nanosuit-augmented Delta Force unit that has been sent to an island in the South China Seas to evacuate a research team that has not been heard from in a week. As you are initially dropped in for the mission, you are buzzed by a strange aircraft and you plummet into the sea just off the beach of the island. Once on the island, you start to dodge, shoot and work your way through the island, fighting the North Korean army, while encountering strange occurrences that are taking down members of your team. As you get deeper into the island, you start to realize that there is more to the island that your team have been lead to believe, and it makes you realize that the North Korean army may not be the bigger danger on the island.

Helping you along in the game is your nanosuit. The suit is an integral part of the game and will aid your strategy throughout the game. The suit offers four modes of use that can be activated at any time. You can go with Stealth, which cloaks you and your weapon, Strength, which gives you to ability to deal massive melee damage and jump really high, Speed, which makes you extraordinarily fast, and Armor, which is the default mode which gives you an added level of protection from bullets and other weapons. Each of these powers, with the exception of Armor, use energy that has to be replenished, so you always have to be checking that power level to make sure you don’t uncloak in the middle of a camp, or run out of speed right before a critical jump. The interface for using the nanosuit is seamless and is activated by a click on the center mouse wheel, and rotating to the appropriate power required.

All of this is fine and dandy, but Crysis has become far more known for its visual style, not its story or suit powers. Rumors of needing a Deep Blue or other supercomputer to run the game are false, as the game engine scales quite nicely from the minimum specs all the way to the most powerful Quad Core processors. If you want the visual that you see in the magazines, you will need a high end machine, but for most it will still look gorgeous on medium. And gorgeous is the best way to describe Crysis, because it is the best looking game that is on the market now, and for the foreseeable future. Most of the environments that you go through are vibrant and full of life. Walking through the jungle, you start to feel a sense of near photo-realism and start to forget the fact that the jungle on the screen is a digital reproduction. Character models are eerily lifelike, right down to the way the irises move when the characters look at something.

The physics of the game add a new sense of strategy to the game as it changes a lot of conventions that have been used in the FPS genre. Everyone knows how you can go into a rickety shack in the game and you are now invulnerable to everything that is fired at you. No longer is that the case. You stay in a building too long and someone might toss a grenade in and bring the building down, or just run over it with a tank. You see a target that is behind a tree; shoot at the tree trunk until the tree falls over. Even the levels where you lose gravity, the physics of weightlessness just seem like they are done right.

Multiplayer expands the game, with two different modes of combat that should satisfy all that decide to take the game online. The first mode, called Instant Action, is a deathmatch type game. The other mode, which is a far better option, is the Power Struggle mode. In Power Struggle, you attempt to take over the enemy’s headquarters. However, you only start with a pistol and a basic nanosuit, so you will have to earn prestige points to get better weaponry and vehicles. Also, you will want to take over alien crash sites that will give you heavy weapons to take out the defenses of the enemy headquarters. While it sounds simple, this mode offers a lot of strategy, but will also make players think before making rash decisions. If you buy a tank with prestige points, you might hesitate before carelessly barging into a firefight.

All of this works out great for Crysis for the first six to eight hours, and then, as with Far Cry and some desperate TV shows, the game decides to jump the shark and introduce aliens. I am not sure why Crytek feels the need to introduce supernatural creatures into the game they make, but it just throws what was a dynamic open game fighting KVA (North Korean Army) troops that were smart and used flanking maneuvers, into a cramped hallway crawl that is all too standard for the FPS genre. And the enemies seem to have gone to the school of direct attack is the only option to defeat the enemy. It is a jarring shock and almost feels out of place after dealing with the first part of the game that encouraged searching out creative options to deal with the enemy. It still looks amazing and it does not make you lose interest in the game, but it just seems like such a shift in the game design, and just brings back bad memories of the Trigens in Far Cry. Also, there is some graphical glitching in the last level that really hurts when fighting the boss. At one point, I actually fell through the surface I was on and got trapped in a polygon haze. Some polish would have helped this, and if feels like they may have rushed the endgame.

Crysis stands as the pre-eminent title to get on the PC. Even with some of the faults that lead up to its spectacular endgame, it is a testament to the Crytek team that this game can still give players a sense of shock and awe, with each new turn in the story. The foundation has been built for a fantastic future with this series, as long as they can work out the kinks that make this game seem so bi-polar. Crysis gets a 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.