I have played both now and it has to be said which ever game you prefer they both have OFMG moments of WOW factor.
Crysis has it when you progress along the river valley floor and it looks like something straight out of 'Predator'.
CoD4 has it when you enter the buildings in the abandoned town of Chernobyl.
Which game is better?
[TFL]Temmu
well i havent seen CoD4 played on the comp with max graphics but i have to say the real factor in crysis with vehicle damage and surrondings is absolutely amazing!!!!
[TFL]Zanarkand
Not played either , because my pc stinks
But if I had the rig to play at max detail and had the choice of only one game , I would choose Crysis over CoD 4.
Simply because I prefer the free movement of crysis . more creativity.
[TFL]BigBANGtheory
The Crysis game engine is certainly superior, however CoD4 is more polished and refined.
One good example that comes to mind is that your encouraged with CoD4 to explore the limited surroundings looking for Laptop's which are basically bonuses that can unlock game features. In Crysis you can have absolutly huge levels with a real sense of freedom but not really any incentive to explore other than to approach a target from another angle or to avoid a particular place.
Crysis also feels alot more like Splinter Cell where as CoD4 is more like CounterStrike or BF2 where the firefights are much more fierce.
One thing that suprised me with CoD4 though was how short the SP game was, you can finish the game in one good days worth of gaming. You can't quicksave either in CoD4 which is good 1st time around because taking risks in game feels more risky as there is a penalty for dying, but its damn right ahnoying for replaying cartain levels because you are forced to start from certain points.
Hideki
i played both, and im kinda leaned a bit but ive played cod4 for over maybe 50 hours so far, and played crysis for maybe a few hours and it went to an auction site lol...
to me, the reality involved in cod4 just blew me away, you dont have to set it to max setting to see it in good shape, the auto setting does it pretty fair according to ur comp capability. crysis had good graphic thats for sure with somewhat futuristic setting where a soldier can cloak and whatnot but i just felt the game was slightly boring the first hour and just gave up quick. the map was kinda huge, dunno what the enemy was doing there but just fire back at me when i was supposed to meet up with some people. i had more chance of finishing up crysis if it wasnt for me playing cod4 before it...
in cod4, i agree the chernobyl part was so freaking ace and realistic looking and i was omfg, i love that part too. i also love that captain's pronunciation in that mission =)
btw 'game unlocking' you're talking about by finding the enemy intel laptops will only unlock cheats... and half of them are useless and in the end the cheats don't make it much more fun but for extra 5 hours of craziness...imo. u'd rather have more fun trying to kill every enemy in a stealth mission where u are totally bloody outnumbered...(i mean the chernobyl one, there are enemy u cant possibly kill tho, coz u get owned in the next few seconds if u do get spotted.)
the 'no quicksave' in cod4 is i think really good imo, because, if you only quicksave and quicksave before a grenade blows up in ur face, u're done to restart the whole mission... and you dont have to keep pressing 'quicksave' button everytime before u go around a corner, which kinda feels dumb, but it does it all for u under safe conditions. sure it can roll back some amount if it only auto quicksaved a few minutes ago, but i liked it this way.
you can get the feel of a sniper when you quietly take people down from a distance with a single shot with a silencer and just crawl through to the mission goal. graphic(shadows are fantastic, all guns are cool, except i didnt feel handguns had their advantage much over bigger guns in this game. should've made it so, while holding bigger guns it takes more time to rotate around the char or something. character motions blow u, as they're taken from real human motion capturing instead of cheap human built 3d animation), sound (u gotta love silenced burst sounds), voice (comes with various accents), missions (plenty flavours but i wonder why they didn't put drivable vehicle missions, you do get on them but u arent the one driving them), acting (they all have their personality, u might start liking ur captain by the end of game ), interface (maybe my first game to play it fine without tweaking this and that in config before game starts), stability (alt-tab survives, no crash during game for once), all 5/5 for me. the only thing i have is, as bbt says, the sp is quite short. you may not get to finish it in a day (definately not on your first try, unless thats the only thing u do in a day...), but then again, i havent had such a game where i felt for playing it over and over in sp... im prolly on my 6th round lol, on various difficulties. thats prolly because every missions arent just 'mission brief -> kill everyone in sight -> follow captain -> kill again -> kill some more -> blow up something -> repeat' but there are various flavours in quite various locations. (altho not too far from it either...)
if you take the veteran (the hardest) mode, you will either, feel like u're really in the war zone or get tired of reloading same place over and over, since u die so quickly lol... but i find it fun to get through it.
i think cloaked likes this game too.
as for mp, i have only played it once and got tired since i get sniped from some bloody unknown place over and over and cant live for over a minute... but thats typical for a first time online on any fps game...
[TFL]BigBANGtheory
CoD4 certainly grabs you a lot faster, with Crysis you are left to figure out a lot more by yourself. I also found it frustrating in the beginning but it soon warms up once you've figured a few things out, like how to use the guns properly.
Hideki
heh, i guess i missed the opportunity to enjoy it much, maybe sometime later i might grab it again.
), interface (maybe my first game to play it fine without tweaking this and that in config before game starts), stability (alt-tab survives, no crash during game for once), all 5/5 for me. the only thing i have is, as bbt says, the sp is quite short. you may not get to finish it in a day (definately not on your first try, unless thats the only thing u do in a day...), but then again, i havent had such a game where i felt for playing it over and over in sp... im prolly on my 6th round lol, on various difficulties. thats prolly because every missions arent just 'mission brief -> kill everyone in sight -> follow captain -> kill again -> kill some more -> blow up something -> repeat' but there are various flavours in quite various locations. (altho not too far from it either...)