Impressions Part 2

We moved down the snowy hill while playing the level, avoiding the steep cliffs that promised certain doom if we happened to fall off. At one point during our decent we encountered some of the alien trooper units in Crysis which look a bit like the Matrix's octopus like machines but glowing blue and with mechanical tenacles. The troopers like to fly around and hang in the distance before charging at you full force. We found that taking them out with the long range machine gun is the best way to dispatch the creatures; waiting until they get close and blowing them out with a shotgun blast is not preferred. The troopers came after us a couple of time during our time playing the level in packs of four and they seem to communicate silently with each other before commencing their attacks.

Our time playing the Crysis ICE level was relatively short but it was memorable. Visually, the game looks as good as we have seen it previously with great looking snow and weather effects along with terrific-looking character models for the troopers as well as our character's weapons.The visual effects from the alien glow to your own Nanosuit's abilities (including the Predator-like cloaking effect) was in full force during our time with the game. What's even more impressive is that the guys at Crytek deliberately brought the DirectX9 version of the game to demo at the EA press event. While the game will still ship with both DirectX9 and DirectX10 ports, it's clear that people who still have Windows XP PCs (and that's most of you) will still get an incredible game to look at and play. Of course that means the DirectX10/Vista gamers will have an even better looking game to check out.

While the ICE level was very cool to check out its not the only thing we got to see at the EA press event. Check out FiringSquad in the near future with some more hands-on impressions of other parts of the game that we got to see last week. All we will say is that Crysis is aiming to be not just a graphical feast but an original first person shooter gaming experience even without the cool bells and whistles (and don't forget a single player demo is due for release on Sept. 25). We named Crysis as our most anticipated game of 2007 at the beginning and in our time in playing various builds of the game we have seen nothing that will change that opinion yet.