Crysis

Back in 2012, I didn't just play Crysis, I survived it.
Running at a smooth, luxurious 10 FPS, every movement felt like I was personally dragging my computer through a warzone. Shooting an enemy? Hope you like 5-second input lag, champ. Explosions? Might as well go make a sandwich while the frames catch up.
It wasn’t a video game. It was a slideshow. A POWERPOINT presentation of pain.
And yet, despite my GPU screaming in agony and my soul aging 10 years every time I turned a corner, I knew... I was playing something special. Something my potato couldn't comprehend.
Fast forward to 2025: Armed with an RTX 4070, I finally booted up Crysis again.
And cried.
Cried real tears.
At 144 FPS, it turns out this game wasn’t just good, it was a masterpiece hiding behind a fog of digital suffering.
Final rating: 10/10
Not just because Crysis deserves it, but because I deserve it for surviving the Dark Ages of 10 FPS gaming.
Thank you, technology. Thank you for freeing me.

Crysis: A Visual Masterpiece
Oh mate, I don't even know where to start! I remember the first time I met both my computer and this game in 2007. My uncle (rest in peace) got me this after I was doing great in my grades compared to others my age. It was a life-changing moment for me. This is the game if a company decides to work on graphics like their life depends on it. I can see people disliking this game in their reviews judging by their times. Look here lads, This game was a Goddess back in 2007-2010. Even at the later dates, only one question gets to be asked during graphic card retails "But Can It Run Crysis?"
Story:
Set on a fictional island(Lingshan Islands) in the South Pacific(Close to China but no...The enemy is Korean), we are taking control of Nomad "a US Marine equipped with the powerful Nanosuit". But what is Nanosuit? It's a technologically advanced suit that grants enhanced strength, speed, invisibility, and armour modes.
Game Mechanics:
Unlike the other games in its time era. Crysis comes with various game mechanics.
◘CryNet Nanosuit 1.0: The core mechanic, the Nanosuit, revolutionized FPS gameplay. You were able to seamlessly switch between different modes as in:
•Strength: Increased damage and the ability to lift heavy objects. (you can't flip tanks and vehicles like our Chief😔)
•Speed: Enhanced movement speed for quick traversal and evasive manoeuvres.
•Armor: Increased resistance to damage.
•Invisibility: Become nearly invisible to enemies.
◘Open Worldish: The game does offer a degree of freedom in how you can approach combat and exploration. You could choose to stealthily infiltrate enemy camps, engage in open combat, or utilize the environment to your advantage.
◘Destructible Environments: Environments were highly interactive, allowing you to destroy foliage, collapse structures, and utilize the environment to your advantage in combat.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
+Groundbreaking Graphics: Crysis was(still is) a visual masterpiece for its time, pushing the boundaries of graphical fidelity in video games.
+Innovative Gameplay: The Nanosuit provided unique tactical options and encouraged creative players' expression.
+Immersive World: The lush tropical island setting was beautifully realized and provided a sense of scale and exploration.
Cons:
-Demanding System Requirements: Limited accessibility for many players at launch.
-Story: Not particularly memorable or innovative. You will have to read books and comics in order to fully understand the lore
-AI: Enemy AI could be predictable and easily exploited.
Conslusion
Crysis, a 2007 landmark, redefined FPS visuals with its demanding graphics. The innovative Nanosuit gameplay, while showing its age, remains influential. A must-play for FPS fans, though be prepared for outdated mechanics.
9/10
Until next time.
Take care everyone.

Dated, flawed, weird, partially broken, more of a techdemo from a forgotten era than a game, but I still gotta recommend it over the "remastered" version. If you ever feel like buying Crysis 2007 you can still do it by purchasing the Crysis Warhead bundle.
I gotta repeat myself, the REMASTERED VERSION IS ASS on both technical and gameplay level. You will have a much better experience playing the OG version.

Can it run Crysis?
Can a question both be timeless and outdated at the same time? Crysis' hayday may have certainly passed, both as a game sitting at around 20 players daily as well as a graphical hardware benchmark, outshined by current ray tracing and nanite heavyweights.
Still when I got my new CPU, the latest Ryzen architecture with 3D V-cache, I felt it only natural to gravitate back to this 2007 landmark game to see if the "Can it run Crysis?" creed still holds up in 2025.
Crysis is a game known to tax systems, that is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because you'd want something heavy pushing boundaries like this to tax systems. But also bad because Crysis is known to be heavily relient on CPU performance, as it is notoriously single-threaded. And what's keeping this game from being fully optimized is that as soon as NPC's AI becomes activated in a level it will drag down performance.
This is a well known bug/design feature and is a reason why sometimes players would purposefully avoid getting into conflict.
As an addendum, Crysis' open level design works great in tandem with this design flaw.
So in order to fully explain how Crysis would be a great fit for modern architecture, which is more about multi threaded approach along with massive amounts of cache to stream game assets we have to look into a little helper program called C1 launcher, which I found out about last year.
C1 launcher replaces the game's exe files and makes the game support Vulkan. It also causes the game to become multi threaded as a result and I'm reading how the best results are achieved with the 32-bit executables.
Upon firing this game up the results were very pleasant. Not only could the game easily hold 300+ fps, I could also see no noticable drops when AI in the level became activated.
I could keep the game at my mix of medium-low settings, but I decided to bring the game's visuals, pop-in and draw distance up higher so it became more of a gaming experience rather than a pure benchmark. Because I know myself, and I know that if I start this playthrough I'll probably have to play it through.
There are minor tweaks to bring Crysis visuals past 2007. Ultrawide support, high framerate support, multi threading, as well as purely visual: POM, texture replacements, higher levels of vegetation and finally edge anti-aliasing. Almost all of this is achieved through ini edits.
But even stripping the game of all of this, and looking at how the programmers at Crysis originally designed the game, we see volumetric clouds, real-time dynamic lighting and shadows, advanced water physics and reflections, environmental effects and destructible environments. It is quite the marvel of modern engineering.
To anyone who'd like to benchmark this game I'd suggest looking into C1 launcher as it comes with zero downsides. To anyone looking to play this game for the first time? You're in for a treat.

Finally, my PC can pass the "crysis test" and run it on ultra settings. Wow, some stuff I didn't expect to see. I thought Crisis is more simple shooter than it really is; some levels were pure surprise. I enjoyed the story line, and I like the characters; they are alive and have personalities.
What a great graphic for 2007, and the game still looks good and young; this game was far, far ahead of its time.
It has glitches and strange behavior at the end that made me mad. Firstly, the game allows you to pass further without a necessary gun, and after you realize you don't have it and load on a checkpoint where you can still grab it, you're probably going to get another annoying bug where this gun just won't work. For me, loading on previous checkpoints helped for both scenarios.
Cons: 1) bugs that border you from finishing the game. 2) Level design is sometimes just strange.

I'm glad I got to buy this before it was lost forever
with that being said it was a fun experience till the very end
10/10

Nice graphics and gameplay, definitley worth playing, but for me the linear advance does not make it good for replaying.