The Crysis demo is finally upon us. Crysis has actually been available in limited, closed beta form for a good few weeks now, but being protected under NDA, I haven't been able to share any screenshots of it. It's also pretty damn hard to write about an NDA'd game. Anyways, now its actually out, and available for all to play its DX10 goodness. Out of the box, the demo includes the Sandbox 2 editor, binaries for 32 and 64bit, and full DX9 and DX10 support. Which makes it a pretty fawking pwn demo before you even fire it up. The demo itself is the first level of the game, and as a plot summary, you're a Delta Force (Or Navy Seal, I know at one point you were a SEAL, but ingame stuff appears to be pointing to Delta Force now) operative, wearing the US Army's new shiny Nanosuit. The date is 2020 before you wonder where it all came from. You fall out of the plane, and despite the US Army's finest hardware and best training, you fuck up the drop (well the drop gets attacked in some shape or form by an unidentified entity. Wouldn't have happened to the SAS, that's for sure. Anyways, you hit the water without your chute deploying, although your suit protects you (handy), and you proceed to regroup with your guys. You pop a few NPA (Korean) troops and meet up with Psycho, before finding the unforunate fate of one of your other fellow operatives, who gets macerated, hoi-sin duck style by some unknown entity. Kind of obvious by now to anyone with any previous information on Crysis, that it was one of those alien things. 'Prophet', your team lead, then contacts you by radio and gives you objectives to complete, which are generally of the murder death kill variety, with main objectives and secondary optional objectives. Although, note on the MDK; stealth is advised in areas. At the end of your objectives, you meet up, and the team is kind of pissy about the lack of intel, and sore at losing about losing a comrade. Oh, and theres a frozen boat parked in the middle of the island, which is a relatively high scoring event on the abnormal-shit scale. As the team decide their next moves, you get set upon by an alien...and after a great cutscene, fade-to-black.

That's the synopsis, hopefully giving the (79) screenshots some context. As for the actual game, its everything it was ever meant to be, and more. The graphics are absolutely outstanding, from start to finish, its more like a film than a game. Beautiful is another great word to pick, it truly has to be seen to be believed. Now, its often the case that excellent graphics are used as a crutch to excuse bad gameplay, but Crysis certainly delivers in that area. Its not only incredibly good looking, but it plays so well too. Enemy AI is clever. They'll supress you, flank you, sneak up behind you and do their stuff. Get inside their heads enough and shoot all their friends, and they'll just turn tail and run. They don't want to die. You can choose a variety of routes to achieve your objectives, sneaking about, 'WARRRGH' gameplay, or the amusing strength-mode-throw-outboard-motor-at-people. And oh, not to make too much noise about it, but the Multiplayer is outstanding. Uh. So I heard. >.>

To close, this is at least a 95/100 scoring game, and worth getting, certainly worth it. I just need to find out the deroagtory term for a korean now, and I'll be all set.