Pilot_51
Crysis SP demo impressions
2007-10-30 2:46 AM PDT
To put it simply, the Single Player demo of Crysis contains more than I expected, but it's partially not as good as I expected. Let me explain.
First of all, not necessarily good or bad, but it performs relatively well for me most of the time with a little over half of the settings on high and the rest (4 settings I think) on low. The frame rate gets down around 10 FPS at about the 3/4 part of the demo when there's many objects and enemies around, but most of the time it's more around 20 or 30 FPS which is good enough to play with. I haven't confirmed those frame rates though, I was only estimating.
I was skeptical about the performance. I wasn't sure if it would be playable or not and was actually rather surprised to get most of the settings on high with minimal impact on performance. The settings I found to cause the most impact on performance are textures, model quality, shader, shadows, and resolution. Since I have an LCD monitor, any resolution other than the native resolution of 1280x1024 looks like crap, so that's the one thing I sacrificed performance for quality.
I'll start with the bad. I expected the physics to be highly advanced. I thought the branches and leaves of trees would be chopped off by bullets, but that's not the case (I must've been thinking of another future game like BF: Bad Company). Palm trees and any plants with a thinner trunk than a palm tree are chopped down by bullets and vehicles, but they're composed of segments that I estimate are about 2 feet long. When shooting down trees in the distance, they fall part-way and then freeze mid-timber, which I obviously found very unusual. I guess since I wasn't close enough to hear it, it couldn't complete the fall and make a sound (joke).
Buildings are composed of objects such as steel panels basically placed together with apparently nothing other than gravity and balance holding them together. It's fun to tear them apart, but they're really the only objects that come apart aside from the palm trees.
Vehicles have their weak points. The tires can be popped to make it difficult to drive or even sending it out of control if it was moving. The fuel canister on the back of the Humvees can burst in flames and eventually blow up the whole vehicle. If you drive in water, the engine will become damaged and stop, giving about half global damage for the vehicle. Aside from that, vehicles run perfectly fine until they reach 100% damage at which it suddenly explodes much like any other game where you can drive vehicles.
I've got some more bad, but I need to get to some of the good first because you need to use the good I'm about to mention to get to the rest of the bad.
The game itself feels a bit longer than I expected for a demo, but I've seen longer demos (can't remember which ones though). It was a bit entertaining to play through and it had a couple spooky sequences. The player character talks and at certain moments control is taken from you to show a sequence, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. The physics is probably the most entertaining part of the game, with the special suit features and owning the AI being closely behind.
The best part of the demo? It comes with Sandbox2, which is the map creator for CryEngine2 (the Crysis engine). One of the nice features of Sandbox2 is that you can test the level right inside the editor; just hit Ctrl+G and you spawn right where the camera was and everything comes to life as it would in the actual game. As far as I can tell the editor is fully featured on the inside, but it appears to be missing a few models. Fortunately it comes with some of the most entertaining objects not found in the demo map, the TAC gun and TAC enabled tanks. This TAC weapon is basically a mini-nuke, a large mini-nuke at that. The TAC gun is smaller and doesn't give a mushroom cloud or much of a shock wave, but it's a considerably large explosion for an explosive launched from a personal weapon. The tank TAC is much bigger and gives both the mushroom cloud and the shockwave, plus it gives an intensive and almost realistic yellow and red glow.
Ammo for all of the personal weapons can be modified within the editor to any number, but here's where I start talking about the bad again, the vehicle ammo as far as I can tell can't be modified within the editor or with a console code. The tank TAC is limited to two shots per tank and it explodes according to the angle of the object or ground it explodes on rather than just straight up as it realistically should, so you end up with a lot of mushroom clouds expanding at weird angles.
The shockwaves of both TAC explosions dissipate incredibly fast. You could send the TAC gun shell about 50 feet away and it'll kill you instantly, but launch it about 200 feet away (give or take a bit) and it won't have any affect. I also find that the explosions don't seem to affect buildings as they did in the "nuke" tech demo, from what I've seen they're left completely intact. While the small TAC shell sends large rocks flying everywhere when it hits terrain, the terrain is left intact.
The editor also comes with tornado and earthquake environment effects. The earthquake is quite lame and I didn't see anything other than my view being shaken. The tornado on the other hand looks decent and is probably one of the most interesting demonstrations of the physics engine. It tears apart buildings and sends their pieces circling around, and yourself or the bodies of enemies can be thrown into the tornado, but don't expect to come out of it before getting killed by shrapnel. The tornado can be given a number of settings such as how strong it is or how fast it moves, but its lifetime is indefinite and its direction is random.
The editor can do a lot more, most of which I haven't fully explored yet. So, instead of describing the rest, since I already mentioned my most favorite features, I'll just say you've got to check it out if you're interested in map editing even the slightest.
If you aren't interested in map editing but like FPS games, you should still check out the demo to see how it performs on your system. You might find it to perform better than you expected.
It's about 1.8GB, so be sure you either have the time or speed to download it. It took me just under 2 hours on my 8.8mbit connection downloading from FileFront while also downloading a bunch of podcasts.
Out of 10, I'll give the Crysis demo about an 8.5. That's mostly because of the editor. If it didn't have the editor I'd probably give it more like a 7.5 just because I wasn't as impressed with the physics or AI as I expected.
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First of all, not necessarily good or bad, but it performs relatively well for me most of the time with a little over half of the settings on high and the rest (4 settings I think) on low. The frame rate gets down around 10 FPS at about the 3/4 part of the demo when there's many objects and enemies around, but most of the time it's more around 20 or 30 FPS which is good enough to play with. I haven't confirmed those frame rates though, I was only estimating.
I was skeptical about the performance. I wasn't sure if it would be playable or not and was actually rather surprised to get most of the settings on high with minimal impact on performance. The settings I found to cause the most impact on performance are textures, model quality, shader, shadows, and resolution. Since I have an LCD monitor, any resolution other than the native resolution of 1280x1024 looks like crap, so that's the one thing I sacrificed performance for quality.
I'll start with the bad. I expected the physics to be highly advanced. I thought the branches and leaves of trees would be chopped off by bullets, but that's not the case (I must've been thinking of another future game like BF: Bad Company). Palm trees and any plants with a thinner trunk than a palm tree are chopped down by bullets and vehicles, but they're composed of segments that I estimate are about 2 feet long. When shooting down trees in the distance, they fall part-way and then freeze mid-timber, which I obviously found very unusual. I guess since I wasn't close enough to hear it, it couldn't complete the fall and make a sound (joke).
Buildings are composed of objects such as steel panels basically placed together with apparently nothing other than gravity and balance holding them together. It's fun to tear them apart, but they're really the only objects that come apart aside from the palm trees.
Vehicles have their weak points. The tires can be popped to make it difficult to drive or even sending it out of control if it was moving. The fuel canister on the back of the Humvees can burst in flames and eventually blow up the whole vehicle. If you drive in water, the engine will become damaged and stop, giving about half global damage for the vehicle. Aside from that, vehicles run perfectly fine until they reach 100% damage at which it suddenly explodes much like any other game where you can drive vehicles.
I've got some more bad, but I need to get to some of the good first because you need to use the good I'm about to mention to get to the rest of the bad.
The game itself feels a bit longer than I expected for a demo, but I've seen longer demos (can't remember which ones though). It was a bit entertaining to play through and it had a couple spooky sequences. The player character talks and at certain moments control is taken from you to show a sequence, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. The physics is probably the most entertaining part of the game, with the special suit features and owning the AI being closely behind.
The best part of the demo? It comes with Sandbox2, which is the map creator for CryEngine2 (the Crysis engine). One of the nice features of Sandbox2 is that you can test the level right inside the editor; just hit Ctrl+G and you spawn right where the camera was and everything comes to life as it would in the actual game. As far as I can tell the editor is fully featured on the inside, but it appears to be missing a few models. Fortunately it comes with some of the most entertaining objects not found in the demo map, the TAC gun and TAC enabled tanks. This TAC weapon is basically a mini-nuke, a large mini-nuke at that. The TAC gun is smaller and doesn't give a mushroom cloud or much of a shock wave, but it's a considerably large explosion for an explosive launched from a personal weapon. The tank TAC is much bigger and gives both the mushroom cloud and the shockwave, plus it gives an intensive and almost realistic yellow and red glow.
Ammo for all of the personal weapons can be modified within the editor to any number, but here's where I start talking about the bad again, the vehicle ammo as far as I can tell can't be modified within the editor or with a console code. The tank TAC is limited to two shots per tank and it explodes according to the angle of the object or ground it explodes on rather than just straight up as it realistically should, so you end up with a lot of mushroom clouds expanding at weird angles.
The shockwaves of both TAC explosions dissipate incredibly fast. You could send the TAC gun shell about 50 feet away and it'll kill you instantly, but launch it about 200 feet away (give or take a bit) and it won't have any affect. I also find that the explosions don't seem to affect buildings as they did in the "nuke" tech demo, from what I've seen they're left completely intact. While the small TAC shell sends large rocks flying everywhere when it hits terrain, the terrain is left intact.
The editor also comes with tornado and earthquake environment effects. The earthquake is quite lame and I didn't see anything other than my view being shaken. The tornado on the other hand looks decent and is probably one of the most interesting demonstrations of the physics engine. It tears apart buildings and sends their pieces circling around, and yourself or the bodies of enemies can be thrown into the tornado, but don't expect to come out of it before getting killed by shrapnel. The tornado can be given a number of settings such as how strong it is or how fast it moves, but its lifetime is indefinite and its direction is random.
The editor can do a lot more, most of which I haven't fully explored yet. So, instead of describing the rest, since I already mentioned my most favorite features, I'll just say you've got to check it out if you're interested in map editing even the slightest.
If you aren't interested in map editing but like FPS games, you should still check out the demo to see how it performs on your system. You might find it to perform better than you expected.
It's about 1.8GB, so be sure you either have the time or speed to download it. It took me just under 2 hours on my 8.8mbit connection downloading from FileFront while also downloading a bunch of podcasts.
Out of 10, I'll give the Crysis demo about an 8.5. That's mostly because of the editor. If it didn't have the editor I'd probably give it more like a 7.5 just because I wasn't as impressed with the physics or AI as I expected.
