Far Cry appeared out of the blue in 2004 and quickly became an international PC favourite.

The same developer, Crytek, has created plenty of hype about its latest outing, though, since it features an interesting game engine, dubbed Cryengine2, along with updated graphics that Microsoft has been touting as proof of DirectX 10’s brilliance.

Crysis’ gameplay centres on a high-tech ‘nano suit’ that you and your comrades don to out-manoeuvre enemies. The suit has four main functions: invisibility, strength, speed or armour.

Armour is the default setting and lets you take a lot more bullets without dying and enables your suit to recover the energy needed to perform the other functions. Invisibility will appeal to stealth-minded gamers, but it drains the suit’s energy and wears out within a few seconds, which is a real disappointment.

Strength is the most innovative suit setting, allowing you to jump several feet in the air onto buildings, over walls and even over enemy jeeps. Strength also means you can grab a bad guy by the neck and do away with him in one go.

It takes a lot of practice to get used to changing suit types (you use the middle mouse button) but once mastered, different suit types can be called upon at speed, allowing you to use the skills you prefer.

The plot is top-drawer stuff with decent voice acting throughout. You start off investigating a disturbance on a North Korean-controlled tropical island, the atmosphere of which feels a lot like Far Cry. After a few hours of dealing with the Koreans on foot, you get to a tank level which is unnecessarily difficult. We had to admit defeat and turn the settings down to 'easy’ to get through, but even then we died a number of times. Get past that point, though, and aliens come out of the woodwork in some truly epic settings, the most impressive being a zero-gravity alien spaceship.

The tank, jeep, flying and zero-gravity levels make the suit abilities less relevant, which is a shame because you’ll only just have mastered them. Another major flaw is that the game ends halfway through the story. Aliens remain on the planet and other loose ends regarding the nano suit technology are left dangling. A sequel is undoubtedly around the corner and the boring online mode (which lacks any kind of team deathmatch) makes it very unsatisfying in the light of Half Life 2’s The Orange Box, which provides several more hours of gameplay.

Crysis has sincere graphical importance though, since Microsoft packed its Vista coverage with screenshots from the game to prove DirectX 10’s value. In fact, several small configuration file changes have been uncovered that enable you to play Crysis with the DirectX 10 special effects on a DirectX 9 system.

Despite this, the extraordinary character detail and gigantic visuals are undeniably jaw-dropping. One level has an entire mountain falling apart, while another has an alien sphere engulf that same mountain. It is cinematic gaming in every sense, although the visuals are dumbed down on all systems not containing a Geforce 8800 or ATI Radeon 2900 or 3800 series card.

The gameplay in Crysis is superb - probably the best we’ve experience this year so far. The Orange Box and Call of Duty 4 last longer and are more complete than Crysis, and the fact that we award Crysis four stars rather than five is simply an indication of the golden era of gaming on the PC that we currently live in.