I finally bought and installed Crysis this afternoon, and after an hour or two of playing I honestly can’t decide whether or not it is good. Most of my initial observations were negative: the on-the-rails feel of cinematics was boring and took you out of the game, the story and plot were absolutely terrible, the suit management interface was awkward and difficult to pilot during firefights, weapon physics were extremely counterintuitive (I’m STILL not sure how most of my firecones behave), many early guns behaved in a stupid way (I’m really, really sick of Shotgun Snipers tagging me with buckshot from 500 paces), and the control scheme was clunky and in some cases extremely counterintuitive. (In practically every other FPS, rising from a prone posture to a crouching posture and then releasing the crouch key causes your character to stand. I can’t count how many times I’ve been killed trying to figure out how to stand up and run away.) Moreover, the weapon handling in general seems to be really clunky; switching firing modes and reloading take far too long and vehicle weapons heat up far to quickly. These are probably meant to balance the game, but in general they just feel like pains in the ass to deal with. The HUD is poorly designed and difficult to keep track of during combat, stashed in the corner as it is. And perhaps most notably, the graphics look like absolute shit on anything but the highest settings. I realize that a lot of the consumer base probably uses extremely good components, and that this includes most of the people to whom graphics are really important, but good god people: Far Cry looks far, FAR better than low-end Crysis does, and it chews up a lot less RAM while doing so.
So, those were my intial poor impressions. Unfortunately, I didn’t really keep track of any later issues, as I found myself having so much fun shooting the everliving shit out of a bunch of barstards that I didn’t notice. Once I figured out how to get around or ignore the bulk of the interface issues, got over the crappy graphics, and tuned out the story, the actual gameplay was a lot of fun. The North Korean soldiers that you fight early on seem like they’ve been stolen right out of a bad propaganda film, crappy accents and all, but firefights can still be an awful lot of fun. The terrain is well-designed to inspire moving engagements, since a great deal of potential cover is destroyable and the enemy tends to outnumber you enough to make staying in one place a really, really bad idea. I have some issues with their Thief-style memories and the corresponding failure to give chase when you get far enough away (“I wonder what just shot me in the leg? Oh well, it was probably just the wind”), but you’re generally encouraged to sweep areas in one big attack rather than to continue advancing and retreating until you manage to get everyone.
Overall, Crysis gives me the impression that the programmers and the designers really hated each other: crappy low-end appearances aside the physics and graphics engines are pretty impressive, but the terrible story and extremely shoddy interface seem to waste the effort. In general, I guess it gave me the same impression as Doom 3: “Gee, what a great engine. I hope somebody makes a game with it”. 
Fuck Crysis. I played the demo and this alone was enough to convince me that the game sucked. Far Cry looks 1000 times better and is hella more entertaining (alpha-male mercenaries screaming “I’m COMIN’ FOR YA!” and “I’ve got a present for you” before throwing grenades, versus lame generic commie Koreans - I’ll take the frat-guy-turned-mercenaries from Far Cry.) The futuristic suits are lame as hell. Cheesy assed cliched characters (tough Mexican guy, cocky British guy, obnoxious black guy, authoritative in-control older black guy sergeant.) And I hear that midway through the game the whole jungle gets frozen in ice - YAY, nothing is more fun than fighting through a bunch of boring blue-gray ice levels.
Fuck Crysis again. Don’t waste your money. Give me Battlefield 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or the original Far Cry any day.
I’ve just come back from a second session, and I actually think the game is growing on me. The engine itself is pretty damn impressive, and combined with what have so far been great map designs it manages to really enable the kind of open-ended choices about tactics that Far Cry tried for but often failed to really achieve.
That isn’t to say, of course, that you couldn’t find more innovation on a baboon’s left ass cheek, because you really could. For every moment I spend gleefully setting up an ambush or sneaking through a river like a crocodile with a cloaking device before lurching out of the water, beating a soldier to death with a water bottle, and disappearing before his buddies can find me, there’s a moment of wondering why in the flying fuck I have to put up with a demented redneck in a spec ops suit babbling on about how he’s right behind me, or covering me, or allegedly doing something else that never actually helps. (And really, these are imaginationland-style military grunts we’re talking about: considering how much time we spend in the field, “I’m right behind you” is really one of the last things I want to hear someone grunting into my headset. “I’m directly in front of you with both hands in plain sight” would be much more reassuring 
)
See, that’s where Far Cry got it right: they dumped you in the middle of an island, gave enough plot to justify skulking and slaughtering your way through the map, and left it at that. They knew that a decent plot wasn’t the point, and they gave just enough to expedite gameplay. The plot for Crysis, on the other hand, comes off seeming like some ham-handed attempt to entice me into playing. When it comes to sneaking around killing bad guys, I think most games should provide an excuse, not a motivation. So I kind of wish the Crysis guys had figured this out.
But it really is an awful lot of fun to play.
…gah. I just wanted to check in to mention that I just finished the game, and ye gods what a piece of shit. I think the good parts I mentioned are more or less valid, but Crysis did *exactly *what Far Cry did: they built a promising game in the first act, and then fundamentally changed gameplay in a way that eliminated all of the good parts of Act I in Acts II, III, and IV.
I mean good god, I thought the “evil commies” cliches were weak bad guys until I met the aliens. I mean, is it really that hard to design more than one enemy graphic?
As for the actual gameplay, I don’t know what the hell was going on after the aliens showed up. I know Crysis used to be a shooter, but it tries on practically every genre in the last half and does so pitifully: rather than a tromp through the jungle merrily beating on people with water bottles, as we were treated to in the beginning, the second half feels like a series of badly organized minigames. You have the “Float In Zero G Really, Really Slowly For Way Too Fucking Long While Punching Armored Squids To Death Because There’s No Goddamn Ammo” game, the “Stare Vapidly At Badly Designed Alien Setpieces That Make No Sense” game, the “Ride Around In A Tank For Fifteen Seconds Before It Blows Up, Leaving Your Ass Stranded In A Huge Jungle Where every goddamn enemy Is Armed With Bazookas Because They Thought You’d Still Have The Tank” game, the “Spend An Obscene Amount of Time Defending Your Sergeant With The Shitty Alien Gun That Jams Every Ten Seconds But Is The Best You’ve Got” game, and my personal favorite, the “Try To Stuff Cotton In Your Ears As Your Companions Repeat Simple Mission Goals To You Every Ten Seconds” game. (In the last fight, I think they literally yell “Shoot the turrets, Nomad!” every five to six seconds until you destroy all the goddamn turrets.)
I might’ve been playing it wrong, but the last half was one of the first FPSes I’ve actually found outright boring: there was practically no challenge, as gameplay was reduced to watching crappy cut scenes and shooting aliens that have REALLY shitty chase AI with your shotgun.
…and then they promise two more games. Yeesh.