Crysis is a lot of things, but the best definition I can think of is a sandbox title for a rich kid with a nanny standing watch close by. Rich because you get a lot of very expensive toys to play with for as long as you like, and the nanny's also really indulgent, only piping in now and then with a "Now now, take that shotgun out of your mouth, you don't want to end up like Kurt Cobain."

Look at the facts, you're got an uber-powerful nanosuit that can pretty much access all its abilities right from the start, you begin with decent weapons and attachments, and the weapons you receive just get bigger and more powerful as the game progresses. For a breakdown, check out the demo review posted earlier. Plus, your enemies are usually camped in comparitively open areas with plenty of foliage around, so it's pretty much a combat junkie's wet dream. Apart from a few areas where you're on a bit of a short leash, you're just given broad objectives and you can decide how you want the shit to go down. You could sneak in under cloaking, do your job, and leave without anyone else being the wiser. You could just launch a rocket into the side of any building around, bringing it down on everyone inside (thanks to the partially destructible environments), and pick off the survivors from a distance. You could do a GTA and rack up an impressive hit-and-run record with an easily acquired Humvee before getting behind the vehicle mounted gun and causing more chaos. Or you could take the extra step to prove how badass you are by decloaking just in front of each victim, grabbing them in a chokehold, punching them senseless and tossing the body away before cloaking again and sneaking off to cries of "Where did that Yankee-Shankee go?!".

This means that playtime is going to drastically vary for different players. If you're a skilled gamer who cuts a swathe through opposition from one objective to the next, you could have this wrapped up in around 8 hours. Alternatively, if you're somebody who likes to carefully plan out their attack strategy and have no qualms doing the belly-crawl to get you a few feet closer to an unsuspecting mark, you could easily make it last more than twice as long.

Anyway, the game starts with your squad of supersoldiers being airdropped over this island paradise that's been taken over by the North Korean military. Being supersoldiers, all of you are entitled to cool callsigns like Nomad, Prophet, Jester, Psycho and Aztec. Of course, it turns out that funky names are never enough to guarantee a safe day at work, seeing that after a botched landing, your team starts getting picked off by mysterious spooky forces. This gets them to wriggle out of having any squad-based missions, so it's mostly you against everybody else. That's great fun too, but some good ol' teamwork would have gone a long way. The sole co-op mission feels more like babysitting than an action hero buddy movie.