Ephebus :
You're absolutely right. My system could run the game well enough at the time, but after having read lots of enthusiastic (paid?) reviews, I was extremely disappointed with the gameplay - or lack thereof. Crysis is not much more than an interactive movie with an expensive marketing campaign behind it. I have a Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory server (my all time favorite FPS) and keep seeing people coming back to the game all the time after having played lots of these newer, far better looking games, because most of them lack the sheer playability of classics like ET.
Ha! That's funny, we could be sharing the same brain - ET is my favorite coop MP game ever! I never understood how (Splash Damage?) abandoned that game for commercial distribution in the first place. Not that it matters - as like you say - the game is awesome. Never have I spent hours distributing health packs to other players, only having a Thompson to defend myself, having that much fun and a sense of collaborative belonging and achievement.
Have you ever played the Thief series (as in 1 and 2, not Deadly Shadows (3))? If not, I think you should - except you'd need a bit of help getting them to run, as they were built for Windows 98 and 2000 respectively
I revived them after playing Crysis 2 (still haven't finished), and was pleasantly surprised to find that yes, they are still the best first person games created to date.
Let me know if you want a quick fix for getting them to run on W7 x64