You have all been waiting for my mini demo review at the edge of your seats. Well you can now stop holding your breath.
My specs:
XP
core 2 duo 6600
2 GB RAM
x1950 pro 256 MB
I got it from
http://na.llnet.cdn.ea.com/u/demos/Crysis_SP_Demo.exe It's fast download.
Intros
There are far too many intro screens which the hell out of me. You got a screen telling you that this demo is intended for promotional purposes only and not for sale etc, ea logo, nvidia logo, crytek logo, intel logo, esrb rating, pegi rating, crysis logo and finally the menu screen. When you start the game there are unskippable movie sequence.
Graphics
I played it on 1152x864 with everything set to medium. If I tried playing on high I would get sub 30 FPS. I use ati tray tools to display the frame rate in real time.
I notice a lot of draw-in/pop-in. For trees and shrubs and also for models. It's bad level of detail. From far away an object can't be seen in detail but when you approach it, it jarringly gets more detailed all of a sudden, similar to the pop in/draw in. It's not well done and not smooth. Very jarring.
You will need one hell of a rig to play this and have it look like it does in all the hype movies. I think the depth of field of effect when using iron sites is horrible. You have a small oval section that you see clearly and outside it jarringly blurred with no transition between the clear part and the blurred part.
Sound
Can't complain, the guns sound beefy. The music is good. The voice acting I have to say is terrific. Sounds very believable.
Physics
The car and boat physics feel spot on. You feel like vechicles have inertia. Everything seems like it has inertia and weight. This is pretty damn well done.
Gameplay
The suit you have does present you with a lot of tactical options. However it seems at least in the demo (maybe because your suit is damaged) that the limited energy for the suit does not give you a lot of time to do cool things like cloak for very long or sprint or use super strength so you mostly end up using guns. The movies had you throwing heavy things at your enemies but with the limited amount of energy that's hard to do.
Also if anyone watches mythbusters you will know that cars don't explode if you shoot their gas tank. Not even catch fire. So when you shoot a gas tank here and the car explodes I can't help but feel that it does not match up with some of the realistic physics that the game has. Also again if you watch mythbusters, you know you can't shoot a palm tree with 8 bullets and cut it down. It's cool just like the exploding gas tanks, but again it does not match up with the realistic physics you see everywhere else.
I like that you can use cover and go prone and lean and stuff like that. It's definately a tactical game. You can try to rambo it but, with lots of enemies out in the open, it's not very easy to do.
AI
Generally enemies will go to find cover and try throwing grenades at you when you are in cover. But I don't see anything new that hasn't been done in other first person shooter AI before. AI is competently done.
Also I noticed that the game tries to access the internet when you first launch it. It's weird why a single player demo would do this.
This comment was edited on Oct 26, 22:04.