ONE. “WE’LL SEE WHO GETS HUNTED!”
In Crysis, you are a hunter. A hunter in something called a Nanosuit, which isn’t just an incredibly small suit but is instead a normal-sized item of clothing riddled with miniature robots that do all sorts of useful things like turn you invisible, tickle your knees so you run faster, and catch incoming bullets.
You are a hunter named Prophet. Prophet turned up the past couple of games as an objective or a quest-giver, but he’s finally got off his robotically-enhanced arse* and deigned to slog around the seven different biodomes covering future New York. You’re in constant radio communication with a chirpy Londoner who advises you of current events and the best choice of action like some kind of near-future shoeshine boy. Constant. Communication. Alcatraz, the previous protagonist, didn’t say anything throughout the entire game.
Prophet never shuts the hell up. Anyway, your chum warns you that you’re going to get hunted by the Ceph. And you disagree, implying you will instead hunt them. It seems like the hunter has, etc.
TWO. “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU ALL – ONE BY ONE!”
Threats are all well and good, as my Grandmother taught me, but not so impressive when you’re shouting them at a building full of aliens who a) can’t hear you and b) probably can’t understand English either. Still, full points for effort.
In the demo I saw, Prophet sneaked about using the cloak function on his suit and assassinated enemies silently using a bow, without becoming visible in the process. Which is good! Stealth games, especially ones that don’t insta-fail you as soon as you mess up, are great.
THREE. “GOING LOUD!”
Like Going Live but with more shouting, this is the title of Prophet’s popular Saturday morning magazine programme. Or – my notes are a bit unclear on this bit – it’s the sort of thing he now says when he drops out of stealth and starts popping those juicy alien motherfuckers with fully-automatic weapons.
It looks like the Cloak will be a lot more important, this time around, which is good – it seemed to consume much less suit power when used, although that might have just been part and parcel of the demo and running out of battery halfway through wouldn’t have looked very good. Similarly, drones will now hover around the level and strip you of your invisibility, leading to gunfights aplenty.
Again, I dunno whether this was purposely done for the demo, but once Prophet has “gone loud” enemies seemed to know where he was before he got there and shot at him appropriately. Although now shooting back is made slightly easier by the inclusion of a weapon that shoots five hundred rounds a second, which is the perfect partner for a bow and arrow, obviously.
When it fires, it sounds a bit like someone twanging a ruler off the end of a table.
FOUR. “THE CEPH WEAPON HAS… MERGED WITH MY SUIT!”
Prophet can carry Ceph weapons now, which sounds exciting but, you know, meh. We’re not talking pheromone launchers, living grapple guns or phase-shifters that teleport explosive rounds right up the bum of an enemy; just jauntier-looking sub-machine guns that shoot colourful bullets, that sort of thing.
In addition to the new selection of weapons, the Ceph have a flamethrower robot called a Scorcher. Or “Score-chah,” as our London radio chum would have it.
FIVE. “I TOLD YOU, ONE BY ONE! YOU’RE NEXT!”
After a gunfight that goes on maybe a bit too long, our hero is cornered by far too many Ceph on the roof of a building. But he said he was going to kill them all, in turn, so that’s all right. He has a good old shout at them and one of them JUMPS INTO THE CAMERA THEN IT BLACKS OUT OH NO.
Crysis 3 is set for release in early 2013
* Actually, it’s someone else’s arse, on account of Prophet stealing a body off Alcatraz, the protagonist from Crysis 2, in what can only really be described as a dick move
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