It feels like we’ve been a long time coming to this moment when our final review of Crytek’s sci-fi shooter Crysis goes public. Crysis has been at the forefront of our minds since that first stunning demonstration at E3 in 2006. We’ve tracked every screenshot and press release over the last year-and-a-half with eager anticipation. We always knew the graphics were going to be fantastic but how the game played as a whole remained a mystery.

How does the story play out? How much use can you get out of the abilities of the nanosuit? The answers to these questions could only be answered by playing through the game in its entirety and experiencing it from beginning to end. Is Crysis the messiah of PC gaming? No, it isn’t. It’s a fantastic shooter but it falls short of the mark for inclusion in the "All Time Greatest List".

Crysis is a first-person shooter from Crytek Studios - developer of the 2004 PC title Far Cry. The year is 2020 and a team of United States archaeologists on an island in the Philippine Sea have been taken hostage by the Korean People’s Army (KPA). The archaeologists recently excavated an artefact of unknown origin which prompted the KPA to seize the island and evacuate the inhabitants. The story follows a United States Delta Force operative codenamed "Nomad" as he and his fellow team members attempt to infiltrate the island to rescue the archaeologists.

Very early on it’s apparent that the KPA are not the only enemies stalking the jungle and soon Nomad is up against the early stages of an alien invasion. The setting for Crysis is clearly science-fiction but the weapons and technology available in the game are more "near future" than purely "sci-fi". In other words you’re not using lasers and beam weapons but the technology is more advanced than what is available today.

Crysis will be remembered as the game that moved the bar for graphics.

Graphics and art design are important if not crucial pieces of any game. It’s been said countless times but it bears mentioning again: Crysis IS the best looking game on any platform. The leaves and vegetation, the motion blur, the depth-of-field effects, the initial flash of an explosion, and the skin textures all work to create a convincing and immersive world. I never got tired of blowing up cars just to see the incredible explosions and watch the pieces fly. No one is running the game at an acceptable frame-rate with every setting turned all the way up but even at the mid-to-lower settings the game never stops impressing.

All that eye candy comes at a severe cost however. Our tests have shown that in order to run Crysis at high resolutions with all the bells and whistles you need hardware from the future. It’s going to be amazing on a computer built two years from now but won’t there be a newer game by that time that looks better? It’s a new standard of PC graphics achievement as well as a dangerous standard in releasing a game that no one can run at the highest settings.

It’s not just the textures and polygons that Crysis does well but also the animation and physics. Everything in the world reacts the way you’d expect to the point where you stop thinking like a gamer and start thinking like a person again. Toss a grenade into a machine gun nest and it could blow a burning barrel into the side of a Humvee. The barrel will burn for a while before blowing up and setting the Humvee on fire which will also blow up sending flaming wreckage all over the place with the force to knock down trees. If you try that same move again at the same spot it will happen differently every time. There’s an unprecedented level of freedom and interaction in some of the Crysis missions that makes replaying them a must.

When I played through the Crysis single-player demo the A.I. didn’t do much to impress me but as you play through the entire game you start to notice that they are capable of some pretty clever tricks. Attacking in packs and flanking are old-hat for shooter A.I. but it’s very interesting to watch them search for you when you’re cloaked. They’ll go to the last place anyone saw or heard you and search in patterns out from that point.

My favourite A.I. moment was when I was taking out a group of KPA on a river bank. I eliminated all of them from stealth and the last guy - seeing that all his boys were down - jumped into the water and swam to the other shore. The A.I. unfortunately gets worse with the aliens so fighting the KPA is where you’ll see it shine. As purely a demonstration of videogame technology Crysis is the best there is.