Ok, I have an 805d and a 7600gt so I should have taken one look at the low/medium graphics and been disgusted by the pop in, low res textures and dodgy lighting. But I wasn't. This game delivers the fun in spades, and I can't believe it but game play saves the day for Crysis. Story seems semi-interesting too.
Playing on the regular difficulty I was starting to doubt. Delta difficulty is where it's at. I must have played through the demo like 6 times trying different approaches and using different abilities.
The stealth mode + silenced weapon is by far the easiest way to stay alive. Stealth-move-shoot-stealth and watch the koreans run over to your last location. Great fun and extremely believable as a near future technology. I wish they would be able to at least shoot in your general direction if you are right next to them.
Strength mode in my opinion is a lot more fun though. With strength and no silencer a zero recoil burst from either assault rifle can kill the heavy armor dudes in one go. You also get a chance to see the enemy AI at work which while not Stalker-level is pretty damn competent with flanking and creeping attacks.
Physics. Mostly destructible environments. Strength-throwing an enemy soldier through a bunch of sandbags. Nice.
Sandbox editor! WOW. Another several hours of game play from the demo. Extremely intuitive. The tank gun appears to have both the speed and drop demonstrating a ballistics mod of the weapons should be possible. The demo was fairly linear with a non-linear bubble around the bay, but overflying the island you can tell there is a LOT of potential for non-linear gameplay. Hell they have flyable helicopters.
I just can't believe how badly Crysis destroys the COD4 demo. COD4 actually takes the graphics glory on my crap GPU at playable framerates, but the linear action and confined spaces feel dated. The only thing I wish was in Crysis that can be found here is material penetration.
This game is like the cosmically polar opposite of Bioshock. It just feels right and nothing feels tacked on or gratuitous. Is is going to replace Stalker as my GOTY? The full game will tell.