Crysis (PC)

This is a lovely, stunning FPS that has an engaging plotline in my opinion.
An asteroid crashes down to Earth, next to North Korea. The North Korean Government seals off the area, claiming the mysteries of the asteroid for themselves. The asteroid suddenly bursts open, revealing a colossal, 2km high alien ship. The ship generates an immense force sphere, freezing a vast portion of the island and drastically altering the global weather system. The invasion of Earth has begun.

You play as Jake Dunn, 'Nomad' in 2020. You are part of the US Delta Force (Special Operations) and the game starts with a parachute jump from a large plane. Anyway, you're there because some archaeologists found something a bit weird; then they went missing and now the North Korean's are quarantining the area.
Your fellow Delta Force team members get kidnapped by large, metallic octopus creatures. You then come to a huge mountain which is the alien mothership. Finally you get up close and personal with the aliens.

The ultra-cool nanosuits give you four great abilities to aid you. At one point you even come across North Koreans who strangely possess the suit and they really are quite hard to take down.
Perhaps the coolest of its super powers is the invisibility power. For as long as your nanosuit energy store will allow you, you can blend into your surroundings like a chameleon. If you move about or fire a weapon, though, your energy stores will deplete faster (instantly in the case of firing a weapon). This creates a nicely balanced stealth feature. The other three abilities are strength, armour and speed. Armour should be on in any open fire-fight as it effectively supplies body armour with the extra energy stores. Strength allows you to jump higher and beat down enemies more effectively, while your super speed ability allows you to move very fast for short periods. All of the nanosuit's powers are finely balanced in a way that panders to the game's set-pieces, which have been specifically designed to complement the nanosuit perfectly.
The freedom of movement of the vast levels allows you to interact in a number of ways with the objects, vehicles and environments. You can attack the game from different angles in different ways. Should you attack with all guns blazing or sneak past with invisibility.

The usual weapons are on offer: missile launchers, frag grenades, assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns, weird and heavy alien mini-guns etc. and you can utilize every vehicle that you come across such as tanks, boats and surface-to-air units. Anything that you can commander you can also destroy!

Some later levels seem to regress from the tactics and stealth required in earlier levels to a formulaic shooter where you deal with wave after wave of pesky aliens that keep bugging you. After the seventh level when you return to the ice terrain this becomes the case. Nevertheless it should take a comfortable 20-25 hours to complete on normal difficulty settings, which requires quite some patience.

Multiplayer seems to be an excellent stripped down version of online shooters, as 32 players can compete in 2 player modes: 'Instant Action' deathmatch and 'Power Struggle'.
Power Struggle is a base orientated multiplayer on large maps with added objectives that need to be achieved for your team to win. This may be taking over military factories for the right to use vehicles to destroy the enemy base.

The game makes great work of DX10 software and so requires a beast of a machine to run it. In return you get visually stunning environments with realistic detailed foliage and bushes that sway in the wind. The tropical setting is beautiful and the water-effects should be looked out for as their second to none. The sound doesn't disappoint and provides the overlapping support for a great game that sadly has a poor ending.

These are the pc specs that I had to run the game:

Intel Quad Core 64Bit Q6600 9.6Ghz (4 Cores making 9.6)
Graphics Card - ATI HD2400 1Gb Graphics Card
Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/Vista
Ram Memory - 2GB DDR2 Ram
16 bit Sound Card - 7.1 Channel Surround Sound
5 GB hard drive space

Hope you enjoy!