So I finnaly re-downloaded the full game, and I woke up early to play a few hours before work.
This is my first impression on the full version. Warning this is a long post so get a cup of coffe if you want to read it all.
Impression stays the same for me this is my game of the year hands down. The whole package is just at another level. There is such an attention to details that make it almost real and beyond any other game currently out there. For example today after countless re-loading at a check point, I was doing the same thing as last time, sneaking up on one Korean and this time he started peeing so it was not scripted. Another example the propellers on the boats are now turning, might be a small thing but thats whats great about Crysis. Then add the small sounds and all the un-necessary details that enhances immersion and gameplay.
Delta difficulty is harder than in the Demo. If you make a misstake you are practically dead, it feels very realistic. This is perfect for me as I like to think about my tactics and slowly approach things and if I try to crazy tactics I get killed very quickly.
The harder delta difficulty resulted a much longer first level. The estimate 10 Hours to finish the single player can not be on Delta difficulty, not at my current speed.
The AI still has one main problem sometimes you can kill a enemy close to another enemy and he does not react. But when they react which they in my experience mostly do the AI are one of the best AI I have seen in a game, flanking using grenades, calling for reinforcement etc. Crysis does not have to use scripting and unlimted spawns to make it hard (hint COD4) which is still a fun game by the way, but in my opionion should not be compared as they have very diffrent approaches on how to engage the player.
Performance wise the full game runs a little better than the Demo. I run it at 1280 / 800 (This resolution scales very good to my 1920*1200 monitor). I have 8800 GT(at 700Mhz), the first level runs fine in DX10 mode keeping everything on very high except shadows and post processing which are both on High.
I also use 2x AA. I might need to turn it down later in the game but up to now it plays smooth.
If I try running on 1920*1200 I have to turn down things quite a bit. I think a card with more memory and memory bandwitdh will do better at higher resoultions but the graphics is still beyond great at 1280/800. If there is any game worth going SLI/Crossfire this is the game. And with great cards both from ATI and Nvidia now around 200$ its actually not to expensive to get a SLI/Crossfire setup.
Overall a game any person that calls them self a PC-Gamer should have on the top of their list to buy, even if they dont have the latest hardware. Its not perfect but comparing to everything else that came before it, its just close to a masterpiece in current graphical engineering and the open sandbox gameplay feels like a breath of fresh air into a genre which mostly have one path/option with scripted action, and for me feels much more mentally rewarding.
The high hardware requirements might be a turn off for many, but if you think how much detail is rendered in every screen its just amazing that we dont have to get close to a supercomputer to run Crysis. If you compare it to other next gen game you have to factor in that the Crysis levels are huge with a lot of details and then add higher resolution textures to that mix and its no wonder its a hardware hog. In my opionion these details and scale is what seperates the good game from the great and puts Crysis in its own division and if you remove a lot of these details to get better performance it would not make it Crysis.
Other current next-gen games should also take note on all the options you have on graphics to improve performance and enable scaling for both newer and older cards. Recent other AAA titles on PC seem to have gone backwards in this department.