The gameplay is good - not groundbreaking, but fine.
I can tell you that this game will be better than
Far Cry 2, because
Far Cry 2 is not being developed by Crytek, but Ubisoft, who created the Xbox version,
Far Cry Instincts (they just distributed the PC version), which was considerably dumbed down from the PC version to little more than an arcade run-and-gun shooter with a really shitty AI. This could suggest that
Far Cry 2 will be the same way.
I dunno, but I really loved the open-ended strategic gameplay of the first
Far Cry, although it was oftentimes painfully difficult (I usually played on the God mode with this game to perfect my strategy).
Crysis is similar, minus the frustration that instead settles for mind-stimulating challenge. That and it has quicksave in addition to checkpoints that
Far Cry did not.
Still, CryEngine 2 is quite amazing.
I look at the timeshift demo and I see really high res textures and am surprised that they aren't everywhere in a game such as Crysis (the worst being certain rocks where you get blurry messes).
I thought that was just me and my mediocre X850XT I was playing on (I still managed to get most of the settings on High, though). But from what I understand, the
Crysis demo isn't fully optimized, which is probably why top-of-the-line GPUs are having trouble handling it. And the game does seem to be highly CPU dependent -- most of my slow-downs were due to physics more than graphics.
I'm surprised at how poorly received
Timeshift has been (Gamespot gave it a 6.5). I played the second demo, and I was amazed at the improvement over the first demo, where Atari was still the distributor. I thought that game looked great. More importantly, I had fun playing the demo. Nothing give me more pleasure than:
(A) Shooting someone and rewinding time to shoot him again, and
(B) Stopping time to steal the opponent's weapons and then shooting them -- yeah, he who is defenseless is far more easy to kill.
I mean the game's no
Crysis, but I highly doubt we'll see a game looking as good as
Crysis for a long time to come. (And by that I mean a few weeks or so.)
FWIW, PC Gamer gave
Crysis a 98%. I do believe that is their highest score ever. (I think
Half-Life 2 got a 95% from them.)