Product Reviews

The long-awaited sequel to Far Cry is finally here. It's the first DirectX 10 game to emerge, and it looks better than anything else we've seen. You assume the role of US Delta Force operator Jake Dunn, and your job is to battle the North Korean army as well as the aliens, which have invaded Earth.

You wear a nano suit and have various futuristic weapons at your disposal. The suit has four functions, the default of which is armour to help you get through the main fights. Click the middle mouse button and a circular menu appears with the other choices: power, speed and cloaking. Power allows you to jump to otherwise out-of-reach places and kill foes with your bare hands. Speed is handy for making a quick exit and cloak lets you move around undetected. A fifth option enables you to customise your weapons by attaching silencers, flash lights, laser sights and more.

The first four settings use the suit's energy reserves, forcing you to adapt your technique in each situation. The wide-open design means you can play levels in different ways. If you want to jump

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in a boat and drive straight over a lake to reach your target, you can, but you can also sneak around the perimeter using stealth.

The AI is surprisingly good - enemies don't bunch up when they spot you, but will work as a team with boat and air support. If they spot you cloaking, they'll fire at your last position and then go into surveillance mode to look for you.

At very high quality settings, textures look almost photo-realistic, and water looks even better than it did in Far Cry. The attention to detail is breathtaking, and the little touches are everywhere. Water droplets streak off your mask when you emerge from water, and frost forms on your gun barrel in the snow levels. While Far Cry was almost entirely jungle-based, Crysis includes treats such as the inside of an alien ship with zero-gravity.

Two multiplayer modes are available: deathmatch and a team-based mode called Power Struggle. It's complicated, but worth the steep learning curve. Each team has to capture buildings to acquire weapons and vehicles, as well as developing nuclear weapons to blast your enemies' bases.

However, to play Crysis at the highest detail settings you'll need a very powerful Windows Vista PC. We tested it with a quad-core processor, 3GB RAM and a GeForce 8800 Ultra with 768MB RAM. Even this setup struggled to reach 30fps at 1,440x900. It's possible to make Crysis look almost as good under XP by downloading a file from www.crysis-online.com/?id=449, but don't be surprised if you have to lower the resolution and quality settings more than usual to get a playable frame rate.