It’s actually becoming a problem: it takes a tester the whole afternoon just to play it thoroughly through once. It’s pretty easy to remember what you were doing if you have to stop and reload the mission later. The fragility of the terrain means you can see at a glance “Oh yeah, that’s where my jeep exploded.” Areas that aren’t flat and black tend to be areas you haven’t been to yet.

Levels are divided up into what Crytek call “action bubbles:” areas with a high density of enemies that would constitute levels in a lesser game, such as a barracks or a Korean-occupied plantation. In Crysis, these are connected in ways they couldn’t be if they were separate levels: if the soldiers in one camp have time to contact the others to call for reinforcements before you take them out, jeeps and choppers will cart fresh meat in from one to the other. You could even use that to your advantage, sneaking round a camp and attacking it quickly before moving on to the next, so that troops leave your real objective to protect the other. It’s Far Cry writ large, a more complex equation and a more engrossing experience altogether.

It’s also more consistent. Crytek is painfully aware that the indoor sections of Far Cry were banal and unworthy of the rest of the game, so you’re outdoors for almost the entirety of Crysis. Even when you are indoors, they’ve built every interior around what they call their “veni vidi vici” philosophy: you come, you see the whole area, then you choose how to go about conquering it. Tight corridors and linear paths don’t let you do that, so they’ve done away with them completely.