I actually dug the stealth mechanic. There are enough games where you creep around silently. Instead, playing as The Predator was a lot of fun to me. Especially as, on higher difficulty, you're vulnerable. I've said it here a few times, but one of my more memorable gaming moments of recent years was trying to raid a small camp in the original Crysis. Only 10 or so guards in it, and a few more running in when the shooting started, but a chopper came overhead. Any time I'd take out a guard the chopper would spot me and start ripping me to shreds. Any time I took cover to get energy back to go hidden again the chopper would destroy the hut I was hiding in, with the walls falling and exposing me again. I was just running like a maniac to get away from the chopper, get hidden, find a good target, take him out, repeat. It was frantic and awesome.
The other memorable moment from Crysis for me was trying to get across a giant battle on an airport, and initially attempting to take out some of the tanks and such, then realizing it's a lost cause and just stealing a truck and driving through it, praying they were too busy fighting each other to shoot me.
I do agree that the energy mechanic is somewhat lame when thinking about it rationally, but it's a game (I don't mean the "it's not real, it's a video game, stupid" argument, I mean it's a game like chess or freeze tag or whatever - a game in that the fun comes from artificial rules), and whether it makes any kind of sense it creates a fun bit of balance. And yeah, that enemies can't hear you going through streams is a bit stupid, but the enemy stupidity was balanced by their ridiculous accuracy. Two wrongs making it kind of fun to me because it created advantage and disadvantage in equal measures. It was still a ton of fun to reappear in front of a large AI group, quickly disappear, then flank them while they all ran to where they last saw you and slowly pick them off. Stupid, unrealistic, whatever, it was enormously satisfying.
That's kind of the shame of hyperrealistic graphics - we expect hyperrealistic everything. If enemies in the Doom era couldn't hear us running we didn't care. In Crysis we do. I'm not saying this is an excuse, but it does ultimately limit mechanics by basing them in real world expectations (the way to get around that, arguably, is go way beyond the real world, but even then...) I took Crysis, and the superior Crysis Warhead, to be big, stupid games. Stupid plot, stupid physics, but enormously fun by managing to make me feel way overpowered yet at the same time be challenged, and allowing me to create some strategy and approach fights in several different ways.
Didn't bother with Crysis 2. I definitely will eventually, but while the different suit abilities in Crysis were fun I don't think they really offered different play styles. It was the environment that let you plan.
This comment was edited on Jul 27, 2012, 09:31.