Was Crysis a masterpiece ahead of its time?

Every gamer worth his salt has tackled Crysis, even today many of us have dusted it off for a quick replay. When it was released in 2007 it was a total system killer, and only a handful of people at the time were able to even touch close to maximum settings at a decent resolution. So intense are the feelings about the game that in the last three years it has been slated, analyzed and hotly debated by anyone and everyone with a keyboard.