I'm a Crysis mapper myself.

You can make spectacular shots,

BUT

wonder why those shots are all in dark shadowy lighting?
Well the answer is, because in broad daylight the look sucks!
The light - shadow engine is good but in broad daylight you will see that an island looks pretty uniform.

Distant trees will over distance either not be shown or become a 2d picture that in color has to be adjusted to the ground texture or it will look ugly and unfitting to the background.

You can set the textures dependant to angle, altitude etc. just like in Vue, but it doesn't have the detail like a render engine, you will notice that very soon.

Closeup shots WILL challenge Vue shots, the vegetation is outstanding... and that's why I don't do that in Vue ( ... lol )

What CryTek does is creating a FAKE look of a carribean ocean by simply making it a picture, the reef is NOT real and infact is a plain rock texture ground with just a "mapped picture" like we say in vue applied.

This is a procedural applied texture map that I made. Atmosphere very simply in broad daylight. The angles are set to 45-90 for the mounts, and stuff is also altitude dependant. As I said it looks very uniform unless you apply a Photo of a real Island and that is pretty cheaty =D

http://s6.directupload.net/images/080326/l8w5a5e8.jpg

That's things you should know about "amazing" Crysis pics :D

Sceneic yey! Landscape... ney!

and this is what it looks like on my island in daylight:
http://s1.directupload.net/images/080326/3ycjdtr3.jpg