Crysis

Crysis etched itself into players' memory twice over: as an excellent open-ended shooter and as the benchmark against which new graphics cards were tested for years. The story sends a squad of American soldiers to a tropical island in the South China Sea, where something considerably older and stranger lurks alongside the North Korean army. The player commands a character in a nanosuit that allows switching between enhanced strength, speed, armor, and cloaking. This single mechanic reshapes the whole structure of the game, because there's always more than one way to attack a base, and the player chooses whether to shoot their way in, sneak through, or drive around the enemy along the beach in a vehicle.

The environment is varied and open, with tall grass, dense jungle, and buildings that can be shot to pieces. Enemy AI tries to flank, shouts to warn each other, and falls back, so even repeated attempts on the same objective play out differently each time. In the second half the game transforms, the pace speeds up, and the tropical island gives way to frozen interiors and weightless gravity; some players welcomed the change, others mourned the loss of the early missions' freedom.

The technical side was utterly exceptional in 2007. The CryEngine 2 engine offered dynamic lighting, light filtering through foliage, convincing water, and extensive vegetation destruction. The game managed to bring even the most expensive rigs to their knees, and the phrase "can it run Crysis" became a permanent fixture of gamer vocabulary. The sound design underlines the tension with jungle ambience and an orchestral motif that surfaces at key moments. Critics praised the freedom of approach and the visual execution above all. Today the game runs without a hitch, still looks good, and its system of tactical choices anticipated many later shooters with more open design. Anyone who wants to remember the era when a single game measured a whole computer's performance has an extra reason to install it again.