 The boring
Know this dear reader, the words which will follow were not intended to be your everyday video game review but a mix of game reviewing, reality checking and perhaps also a statement of intention. If you are exclusively interested in our take on Crysis, please feel free to skip the whole first part of the article and jump directly to the actual review (you've been warned).
Here at PixelRage we've been avid video gamers for most of our conscious lives, some of us are young, some of us are already growing a beard like Guybrush Threepwood and some of us are well on our way to becoming old school farts.
We witnessed the birth of the video game industry, we lived the shareware era, and now we see the multi billion $$$ industry that it is today. At some point along the line we decided to comment on all this (as if anybody gave a damn).
We rated the games on a 1-100 scale, we talked about graphics, sound, system requirements and other software specific considerations (gameplay being the only non-software rating criteria) but in the end we always felt that the score we gave a particular game was a very subjective one, based more on the impression the game as a work of art left in the mind of the reviewer.
So at times we felt confined by the software biased rating system, and more than that there were plenty situations where the rating of the game conflicted with the overall taste of the review. And we're not the only ones to lament on this.
One of the most recent and well done sum-ups of the fallacies of game reviewing was done by Kotaku here's the link. It's an excellent read, and I recommend it to everyone and anyone interested in reading or writing game reviews.
Two main themes in Kotaku's article are:
- Gaming sites mainly review software and not pieces of art
- The scoring system used, in the end usually has no meaning for the user/reader/game buyer.
So given that we completely agree with this point of view, we shall try to change our reviewing and scoring system in the future in order to increase the relevancy of the number and also the overall feeling of our articles.
We shall write the reviews in three main parts:
1.  The software review including considerations about graphic engines, sound systems, requirements, compatibility and user interface design.
2. The work of art review which will focus on story, level design, texture art, voice acting, actual musical score and gameplay.
3. The highly subjective opinion of the human reviewer which will take into account the learning curve, play time, addictiveness, sheer fun and the rest.
It's not by any means a perfect approach, but it's a start, we think, in a good direction.
We are also flirting with the idea of dropping the 1-100 scale for scoring along with the current criteria and move to a 1 to 5 stars scoring system, along with the pros/cons rundown at the end and a final score based on (in this order) subjective impression, the game as a work of art, the game as a piece of software.
We chose this particular gaming event the launch of Crytek's Crysis to try our new approach for a few reasons.
First, the game has wonderful new technology to bring to the table in the form of CryEngine 2 along with it's editor.  Second, the story and general gameplay is way behind the technology in our opinion and it's a contrasting example of good software not so good art. And lastly, because the opinions we've so far seen on the interweb regarding the game are all over the place, from fanatic fanboy-ism to total hater-ism (if we can phrase it like that...).
The Crysis software
The graphics, oh my ... Surely you did not think we were going to speak about anything else first, right? And we SHOULD not speak about anything else first when it comes to Crysis.
Let's try some adjectives to describe the visuals of this game: stunning, never_before_seen, excellent, breathtaking, impressive, most impressive, next gen (whatever that is), and we could go on for a while. But you get the idea.
After 30 minutes into the game we simply could not mutter anything but omg or wow or holy funky s*it. Never before we've seen real time rendering on a computer to match the looks of CryEngine 2 as far as photo realism goes.
Without a doubt, the engine can deliver more than what can be seen in the game, because there is not much to see there besides the tropical island setting, the tropical island setting with a twist and a bunch of corridors on a battlecruiser ship (think US Navy, not Starcraft). |
