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