DNA Tracing - CRYSIS POINT

Crytek has been forever blowing action bubbles

- Jeremy Peel

It took Crytek’s latest game, Hunt: Showdown, to teach me how to play its very first. The studio’s 2004 debut, Far Cry, had seemed like a devolved stealth game – a stunted halfway point between Doom and Dishonored. But there’s a satisfying throughline from where the company began to where it is now.

In Hunt: Showdown, a particularly brutal twist on battle royale, noise is deadly. Gunshots telegraph your position not just to the zombie mobs that roam the map, but to other players hungry for the same bounty you’re after. Yet sometimes you have to open fire to survive the toothy advances of a hellhound.

Far Cry functions according to the same principles. This was a time before silent melee takedowns – when your machete was a clumsy last resort, and silenced weapons were rare. Rather than attempt to ghost your way across the tropical rainforest, it’s better to pounce on patrols quickly and decisively – then dive into the cover of a nearby cave before reinforcements arrive.

BUBBLE AND SQUEAL

By its next game, Crytek had baked this phased play into its mechanics. Crysis was built around a muscular exosuit that made you look like an exhibit at Bodyworlds but allowed you to switch between powers at will: super speed, extra strength and an invisibility cloak that required careful deployment to make best use of your limited battery. The studio had managed to codify its quiet-loud approach in level design, too: read the interviews it conducted with press about the