02.25.08
Day in the life of a supersoldier
The moisture of the forest bed can almost be felt through my nanosuit as I crawl through the rain-soaked bushes to the edge of the cliff. I look around, admiring the slowly shifting vapours under the palm trees, glittering with fresh mildew in the morning sun. The river in the canyon below reflects the pale light and glimmers like a picture on a post card. Behind the trees on the cliffs at the other side of the canyon, watch towers mark the location of the base I’m going to. Yeah, this spot will do just fine.
I break out my binoculars and do a quick zoomed out scan of the treeline. The hardware picks up a few soldiers patrolling the road between the camp and the bridge. Quickly locking them into my radar, I zoom in closer on the nearest watch tower where a sniper has let down his guard. For a few seconds I watch him completely fail to pay any attention to his surroundings, then lock him in as well before continuing along the road. Looks like the main entrance is pretty well guarded. Another soldier has manned a mounted machine gun and appears to be watching his patrolling friends - almost like he has a sense of what’s about to happen.
I won’t be going in the front entrance. My tactical satellite map shows a route up the side of the mountain which is unlikely to be well patrolled, the best way in is probably to take a jump into the water below and swim around to the side. Shouldn’t be too hard to slip in right under their noses. But first, I’m going to even the odds a little. With a reassuring click, the safety on my precision rifle is off. Thanks to the 10x zoom on the scope I picked up in a guard shed a few hours ago, I would have to mess up really bad not to hit what I intend, even at this distance.
As I pull the scope up to my eye, making sure I’m nice and comfortable, I switch my suit to Strength mode, steadying my aim and bracing for the recoil. I gently squeeze the trigger and paint the floor of the tower with the unattentive sniper’s final thoughts. I quickly find the two patrolling guards in my view and track them as they dive for cover, but they’re moving too erratically to hit - it would be a waste of ammunition, and I only have 7 rounds left. My sight follows the road up to the sandbags with the machine gunner, who has sensibly chosen to duck behind cover. Unfortunately for him, I’m high enough that I can still get a good shot at his head. I squeeze off another round but curse my aim when it bounces off his helmet, throwing it off his head. He stumbles out from cover, bewildered, just long enough for me to get off a second shot that buries itself in his chest. He drops like a rag doll.
Well, that got their attention. My radar shows a few of the soldiers I passed earlier converging on my position. Strapping the rifle back over my shoulders and picking up my silenced FY71 assault rifle, I set the nanosuit to Armor mode and jump off the cliff. The suit absorbs the impact with the water and the built-in oxygen tank turns itself on right away. When I reach the shore, I’ll cloak and disappear into the undergrowth before anybody figures out which way I left. And now to find that path up the mountain…
Crysis is the best sniper game I’ve ever played. Several factors contribute to a superbly authentic experience: The enormous world with a frankly absurd draw distance, the canny AI that’ll send enemies hunting for you if you discharge the particularly noisy sniper rifle so you have to relocate between every couple of shots, the fact that you can prepare the shot by finding a good place to lie down and activate your Strength mode, and the way there are gameplay benefits of using your binoculars to lock enemies into your radar before you attack. Obviously I don’t know what it’s really like to be a sniper, and I’m quite happy not knowing, but Crysis fits pretty well into my impressions from films and what I’ve read. Above all, it takes patience and preparation to snipe well, and I really enjoy that.
Razumasu said,
February 25, 2008 at 19:33
Sounds like a pretty good game when you put it like that….
Jonas said,
February 25, 2008 at 20:18
I may have tweaked the truth a little in my little fictionalization up there (not that you can’t do everything I described, but on my first playthrough I fucked it up so badly and ended up falling over the cliff and finding that mountain path by accident
), but it really is a great game. And what I described was just a quiet jungle sniping, because I wanted to describe why Crysis has such terrific sniping.
I could’ve described far more dramatic sequences such as the helicopter chase I accidentally got myself into by shooting a helicopter with my last rocket (it takes 2 to bring them down) or my Rambo-style raid on the harbour in a later level. There are some really impressive and memorable sequences in this game, I’m just most impressed by the emergent stuff
Or in a shorter reply: Yes it is a really good game! You should get it.
fox said,
February 25, 2008 at 20:38
The first game that offered great sniping was Delta Force. DF1 and 2 had an excellent singleplayer but at a horribly low screen resolution. For “DF3 - Land Warrior” they used a much better looking engine and it was great in MP (30 people on the same map) over NovaWorld, which worked pretty good and was free for all customers of the game. The AI (used in the SP and real coop-missions over the internet) was very bad compared to DF1 and 2. After DF-LW every new DF sucked, imo. There are rumours about the release of a new DF this year though, so we’ll see…
It offered pretty much everything that you seem to enjoy with Crysis except the suit and the next-gen graphics. The maps and the draw distance were gigantic. There were also indoor-areas (without loading-screens when you entered them) like huge prisons which looked beautiful as well and it even offered things like breakable glass and materials you could shoot through. The bullets behaved realistic and the waepons offered different fire modes etc… which was all totally new at that time. And the best thing about it was indeed that the game offered me plenty of time and space to plan my attacks and pick them off one by one - sometimes.
As you can see I was in love with this game and I never understood why it wasn’t highlighted as one of the most important role models for modern tactical shooters. Well, Joint Operations was a bit more successfull and also pretty brilliant but it was build on the mechanics of DF. It even came with an map-editor that somepeople used for some nice custom maps.
Jonas said,
February 25, 2008 at 22:16
Yeah I agree, check the text on the third picture from the top
I had loads of fun with the original Delta Force, I remember playing it with my friend and sniping with the Barrett .50. I played DF2 briefly a year after it came out (when I finally had a PC that could run it), but I haven’t played Land Warrior.
Crysis has several things that make it far far more enjoyable than Delta Force, but that’s to be expected since DF is quite old now. First of all it has a better AI, as you mentioned - if you start sniping them, they’ll actually come hunting for you, often even calling in chopper support. It also has a far better sense of direction, which can be seen as a limiting factor but which is something I personally like - you’re not wandering aimlessly as much in Crysis as in DF. And the final thing I’ll mention is that Crysis actually has a story. It’s not a very good story, but it’s there and it provides quite decent context.
fox said,
February 25, 2008 at 22:33
Of course you are right that Crysis is superior to DF in almost every single aspect, which is the great achievement of Crysis. It’s not revolutionary in any way but it refined the mechanics of it’s genre carefully and very well by adding things like the suit, more breakable objects and optimized graphics etc.. I just wanted to point out that there are some similarities and how impressive DF was for it’s time. It’s really underrated.
I have very high hopes for Far Cry 2, which instantly reminded me of the Delta Force-feeling when I saw the trailer for the first time (see OTP-thread).
Jonas said,
February 25, 2008 at 22:36
I can’t wait to play Far Cry 2. More games need to be set in Africa, clearly.
EER said,
February 26, 2008 at 10:34
I loved DF
Unfortunately, the only one who dared play me (in coop) was my nephew. He’s someone who does not understand why a rifle is not automatic. And who is the enemy. So in DM, I shot him from a few miles
Ahh the memories, maybe I’ll get crysis, once I have a better rig.
Jonas said,
February 26, 2008 at 17:14
The only thing Crysis is missing that DF had is manual adjustment of sniper scopes based on distance to the target. That was such a cool feature, but I guess it may be a bit too hard core for the mass market, and of course it’s easy to assume auto-adjusting scopes have been invented in 2012 or whatever. Its inclusion would’ve been the final touch to make Crysis the ultimate sniper simulation.
Well, as “simulating” as a game can be when you can make yourself invisible.