Crysis -- Am I Just Not Getting Something?

The Game Room
1

So, I thought it’d be time for a little bit of gaming again, and decided to go for a nice little FPS – Crysis, which I’d heard a lot of good things about.

Now, I’m probably not what you’d call a ‘skilled’ gamer – I do like to play games, and particularly shooters, but I don’t really devote any substantial amount of time to honing my abilities. Nevertheless, I’ve at least been capable so far, i.e. able to complete most games, and my occasional multiplayer experiences have at least shown me that there are worse players around. Thus, with the rave reviews it’s been getting, Crysis seemed like a good choice to wast an afternoon or two.

But all that’s so far happened is that I died in some jungle with nothing but plant matter filling my screen in all directions. I just can’t seem to get the hang of that game; I constantly seem to have about nine rounds of ammo in my gun, and if I spend them to kill some enemy, a boat about a mile offshore suddenly opens fire and I die. Yet again.

So, to sum up, all I’ve done so far is looking into vegetation and getting killed. I know about the armor’s special abilities, like invisibility, strength, and speed, but none of those seems to work for any appreciable amount of time. If I try to actually sneak past a group of enemies, I just wind up decloaking right in the middle of a bigger group of enemies.

And I’m currently playing on the easiest setting, which I’ve never done before, and I’ve played a lot of shooters between the original Doom and Painkiller or whatever the latest thing I played was. It used to be: point your gun at whatever you want to kill, and then kill it. Now I’m walking through some plants, and then I’ll hear somebody firing, and then I die.

So, is this game hard, or do I just suck? Does it get better/easier at some point, or should I just shelve it if I’ve not managed to get into it by now?

2

Crysis is a pretty unforgiving game if you play is as a run-and-gun. Which is unfortunate since it’d be much more fun that way, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed that your hapless enemies have the same vision capabilities as you. If you can see them, they’ve probably already seen you, emptied a clip into your chest, thrown a grenade and called in backup.

It sounds to me as though you’re having trouble locating the Bad Korean Army Guys in the processor-melting foliage. Are you using your binoculars? On the easy difficulty, especially, they’ll detect and tag BKAGs on your minimap with a minimum of discomfort. This in itself makes the game much more manageable.

You mentioned running out of energy in the middle of firefights. Moving with the cloak engaged drains your suit extremely quickly - crouching, or ideally remaining still diminishes the expenditure greatly. Crysis is more of a stealth shooter than anything and my runthrough on Hard mode generally involves proning around until you can barely see the BKAGs, equipping stealth and a silencer and popping heads from extreme range. The AI generally mills around stupidly even with a couple of slugs in their stomach until they hear an actual gunshot.

I’d suggest trying to slog through to the “end” (although you won’t get much closure until the next Crysis) simply because the last few levels are the most creative and unique parts of the game.

3

Seconded. Especially in the first half, you must be careful and pick your enemies apart piece by piece. Silencers are your friend, and if it gets too hot, you have speed mode for a quick getaway.

Quicksave and quickload are also your friend.

And avoid raising the ire of a boat in the water until you are prepared to deal with them, as they have inexplicably good vision and aim, and will pick you out in a moment.

Crysis is very much the opposite of a Doom or Painkiller style fps. You’ve got to be sneaky, cautious, and conservative.

4

OK, after re-evaluating my strategy (i.e. stopping running around like a headless chicken with a gun, trying to shoot everything that moves), and incorporating some of you guys’ tips, I’m now really digging it. The graphics are great, even on my somewhat sub par machine, and now that I’ve figured out how to efficiently use the suit’s features, I don’t know how I ever did without it.
Sorry for the frustration vent, and thanks for the hints!

5

Exploit the AI it’s as dumb as bricks.

Scan area for cover. Run to cover in invisible mode. Recharge behind cover. Pop invis on again leave cover until you spot the closest enemy pop on strength if you want a punch kill armor for gun kills. Run back behind your cover regenerate your power. If they follow pop invis again and find different cover they’ll loose you every time.

This strategy just about ruined the game for me. You can win every fight no matter how many enemies once you realize how dumb the AI is when it comes to your invisibility setting. As long as they’re not looking right at you when you turn it on and you’re not inches from their nose while you find cover they loose your trail and you’re free to be a lethal jack-in-the-box.

6

But isn’t that the whole point? The suit is supposed to be badass for a reason.

7

While I agree with Darkhold that the unrealistic AI does sometimes needle away at the suspension of disbelief, there’s just something fantastically fun about sneaking into a hut in stealth mode, blasting away out the windows for a clip and using maximum strength to smash a hole in the wall and dash away as the ruins crumble and the grenades explode.

8

One of my fondest Crysis memories was picking up a water bottle in a warehouse and taking it with me. Later on I found myself in a river with umpteen thousand (well, at least 5) guys with machine guns, and I must’ve spent half an hour slowly crawling underwater, lurching up behind an unwitting soldier, hitting Strength, bashing the bejesus out of him with my water bottle, and plunging back into the depths to hide.

9

Well I don’t know. If I was in a squad of six guys some semi-invisible guy appeared killed one of my team went behind a rock then came back at my team from the same place (maybe from the other side of the rock) I would figure out pretty quickly what was going on. Certainly by death #3 I’d be keeping an eagle eye out for any blurred object that came from that direction, but no in this game you can do the same move from the same area of cover over and over and the enemy will forget all about you in ten seconds flat.

AI in that game is terrible. No worse then the AI in most FPS’s I’m sure but that suit really shows how glaringly dumb they are.

10

That’s a problem of most sneaker-shooters though; either you get spotted, and an alarm rings and you have to start all over again, or you need to have everyone who spotted you forget they did, which isn’t exactly very realistic.
However, I definitely prefer the latter method, since I don’t find much joy in keeping track of half a dozen guard routes and working out the exact nanosecond when to cross which floor only to be thwarted again by a blaring siren that indicates you’ve stepped a millimetre too far to the left.

11

Any tips for taking out helicopters? I shot all my ammo at it, and started two fires, but it’s still shooting and killing me. I can’t get away from it because it’s on a very open mission.

12

The only way I could take them out is to use the RPG. Usually two hits will do it, but sometimes it takes 3.

13

I had mostly the same experience as you, but once I got the hang of the game I’ve played it a LOT. I’ve replayed several of the levels many times, and now it’s no challenge unles I’m playing at the hardest difficulty, Delta. That’s a result of how much I’ve played this game, not any inherent skill, generally ‘Normal’ type difficulty is a challenge for me on most modern FPS games.

14

AK74 and explosive ammo, shoot at the tail rotor. There is locational damage, so if you take out the tail, it goes down.

Rocket launcher is a much, much better option though.

15

I just got Crysis recently, mainly to put my new gaming machine to the test. It’s a decent game with lots of eye candy, but it’s almost too easy once you get used to taking advantage of cover, invisibility, and the stupid AI. I tried playing on the hardest difficulty setting just to make sure, but nope, still way too easy. Just take your time and engage from a distance (and from behind cover) and nothing can touch you.

Why is either of these things necessary? Ideally, the enemy should simply react like they naturally would when they’ve spotted the guy with the invisible super-suit slaughtering some unsuspecting schmuck on the perimeter: stay behind cover, shoot at any funny movements, pepper the area with grenades, and call in reinforcements. Lots of reinforcements. They definitely shouldn’t assume you’ve left the area after it’s been a whole thirty seconds since the last guy took a rifle round to the head. :dubious:

(And above all else, avoid doing things like running out into the open field where all your buddies’ corpses are lying with gunshot wounds to the head. Also avoid running into the middle of said field and standing stock still. :smack:)

In my experience, things only got difficult when I made the mistake of engaging a group of enemies too closely; once they spotted my position they moved in very quickly, and the only way I could survive was to immediately retreat to avoid being outflanked and ventilated. If the enemy AI was only intelligent enough to press that kind of assault more often, and to hang back and use cover to prevent me from picking them off at a distance, it would be a much more interesting and challenging game.
Oh, and one thing that annoyed me about the game in a very petty way was the fact that you would almost immediately run out of ammunition for your standard issue SCAR, which would then become completely useless. Sure, the Korean forces drop FY-71s like candy at a Thanksgiving parade, but the SCAR is just cooler. :stuck_out_tongue:

16

Here is a more difficult AI someone made that makes the game far more difficult… Almost too difficult at times.

http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=36042

17

Too right. Once you figure out just how uber that suit is, and the hotkeys for switching functions it becomes a slaughterhouse. Even more so once you figure out that with a bit of hotkey practice you can also reconfigure your firearms in half a second for optimum effect.
“Red dot and a silencer for you, and assault scope and no silencer for you and strenghtmode-throatgrab-throughawall for YOU. Hah!”