Alcoholist

ciyrss does some pretty cool stuff early on. you’re given the element of surprise so you can choose how to attack korean camps, from which direction, or even whether to attack them at all. you also get a lot of tools to do this stuff. the nanosuit powers give a good deal of flexibility. the ai isn’t psychic which is probably the best part, it’s actually pretty good. it’s dumb enough that you can trick it but smart enough that it will go and search you out in tactically correct ways. this is most obvious when you’re playing stealthy and get spotted. you can go hide somewhere else and watch them bound up to where they last saw you, split off into teams and go search the area and stuff. that stuff is all dynamic, not trigger based, which is awesome.

there’s some other stuff which is trigger based which helps too. a lot of bases have a guy with a flaregun and if he shoots it, backup will come. so at first you just try to stop the flare going off. but you can also be creative, you can alarm them to trigger the reinforcements, then ambush the reinforcements, steal their technical and assault the base with it. this is cool stuff because it has a system which, once you understand and can predict it, is left pretty open to player manipulation.

in some ways though it would be nice to see less choice. ycriss is obsessed with being tacticool, and you can put like 20 attachments on any of your guns. the problem is that it lets you turn most guns into something useful for any situation. so you never are really forced to make do with limited or inappropriate equipment, you aren’t given tactical challenges like that. you never really have to go ambush a sniper and take his weapon because you can just use your assault rifle with a sniper scope mounted on it instead. you never have to force the enemy into a close-range engagement because you can always modify weapons to be effective at almost any range.

if you look at the basic mechanics of cyrsis’ gameplay, it’s pretty guerrilla. it’s you as one guy against generally like 1 to 3 squads of koreans. you’re outnumbered, and it comes really close to forcing you to outthink your enemies, and the suit powers give you a great tool to do that with. but by giving you highly adaptable weapons they’re also kind of removing an element of personal weakness. it turns you into something of a walking army when you can carry around an assault rifle that can be turned into a sniper or SMG within seconds, plus a rocket launcher in case the helis come in, etc. It makes you have to plan less, which is too bad. an ideal fix for this would be removing the attaching system, so weapons come with stuff and you can’t change what you have, or else making it take actual time put on and take off attachments, so you couldn’t just do it in the middle of battle when it’s most convenient.

anyway later on the aliens come and they’re really boring to fight. against the koreans you have to use tactics but with the aliens you don’t really, it’s just easier to blast them. not like they ever roll on you with anything as annoying and instantly deadly as the korean mgs or helicopters. the game basically turns into a shooting gallery when the aliens show up and i wish they never did. the first third of the game where you’re plodding through the jungles like a green beret from the future are pretty sick, and it would be nice to have a whole game of that.

it makes me wonder when the fuck crytek are gonna learn this lesson. remember far cry? the first one? that one was also good, until the mutagens show up. why do they keep ruining good games with stupid sci-fi bullshit. it tends to just strip all tactics and turn things into basically a rail shooter. ugh.