The original Crysis game has always been, and still is, a trial by fire for gamers to see how powerful their PC's are. However when Crysis 2 came along gamers were expecting PC's all over the world to turn into smouldering pieces of melted metal & plastic, but the graphics didn’t quite cut it...and neither did the gameplay, or the story, or anything really when compared to the first game. So now 3 years later Crysis 3 has landed on our laps, the question on everybody's lips is will there be another PC massacre and is it as fun to play as the original?
24 years have passed since the events of Crysis 2 and a lot has happened since then. *CRYSIS 2 SPOILERS* So Alcatraz sort of died at the end of the last game and in doing so the spirit of Prophet, who committed suicide at the beginning of Crysis 2, possessed Alcatraz's dead body and regained control of the Nanosuit. He was then captured by the C.E.L.L corporation and New York was quarantined under a giant Nanodome named the 'Liberty Dome' allowing nature to take its course and trapping the remaining Ceph forces giving C.E.L.L a good shot at gaining world domination. *SPOILERS OVER* When Prophet is busted out of C.E.L.L captivity by his old buddy Jason Statham, sorry Michael 'Psycho' Sykes and told that he needs to enter the Nanodome to take down the remaining Ceph and C.E.L.L to finally end the battle that has been going for nearly 30 years, we are finally booted back into the shoes of the superpowered, super awesome Nanosuit and let lose on the streets of New York.
Crysis 3's story is definitely a lot better than whatever the hell was going on in 2 but it doesn’t have the magic that Crysis 1 had (and even that story wasn't very good). From the off you know what you are going to be doing in the game and why you are doing it which I suppose gives the game direction but it makes it feel like every mission leading up to the last few is just padding and unnecessary. Prophet speaks a lot in the game too which makes a nice change from the series standard silent protagonist. The dialogue is often quite well written too but that doesn’t mean it carries emotion or gravity well, after all 90% of the overall cast of this game are gravelly voiced men. The supporting cast of Psycho & Claire are well acted and carry an emotional and at times more interesting story of their own to do with how Psycho lost his Nanosuit and how Claire is helping Prophet in an attempt to correct the many bad things she has done in her life for means of scientific advancement.
Without spoiling it too much the end of Crysis 3 is very underwhelming. You are given a gigantic boss battle that is made near impossible to lose on due to the fact that you are invulnerable to every attack that the foe can throw at you besides one which is easily avoided. The two final cutscenes both hint at possible future Crysis games however there is really no need for another one set after the events of 3 as there is almost nowhere the series could go from here. Although the final battle is stupidly easy and the ending is a little cliché, it does tie up the plot rather nicely leaving only a few questions unanswered, mainly to do with Psycho though.
24 years have passed since the events of Crysis 2 and a lot has happened since then. *CRYSIS 2 SPOILERS* So Alcatraz sort of died at the end of the last game and in doing so the spirit of Prophet, who committed suicide at the beginning of Crysis 2, possessed Alcatraz's dead body and regained control of the Nanosuit. He was then captured by the C.E.L.L corporation and New York was quarantined under a giant Nanodome named the 'Liberty Dome' allowing nature to take its course and trapping the remaining Ceph forces giving C.E.L.L a good shot at gaining world domination. *SPOILERS OVER* When Prophet is busted out of C.E.L.L captivity by his old buddy Jason Statham, sorry Michael 'Psycho' Sykes and told that he needs to enter the Nanodome to take down the remaining Ceph and C.E.L.L to finally end the battle that has been going for nearly 30 years, we are finally booted back into the shoes of the superpowered, super awesome Nanosuit and let lose on the streets of New York.
Crysis 3's story is definitely a lot better than whatever the hell was going on in 2 but it doesn’t have the magic that Crysis 1 had (and even that story wasn't very good). From the off you know what you are going to be doing in the game and why you are doing it which I suppose gives the game direction but it makes it feel like every mission leading up to the last few is just padding and unnecessary. Prophet speaks a lot in the game too which makes a nice change from the series standard silent protagonist. The dialogue is often quite well written too but that doesn’t mean it carries emotion or gravity well, after all 90% of the overall cast of this game are gravelly voiced men. The supporting cast of Psycho & Claire are well acted and carry an emotional and at times more interesting story of their own to do with how Psycho lost his Nanosuit and how Claire is helping Prophet in an attempt to correct the many bad things she has done in her life for means of scientific advancement.
Without spoiling it too much the end of Crysis 3 is very underwhelming. You are given a gigantic boss battle that is made near impossible to lose on due to the fact that you are invulnerable to every attack that the foe can throw at you besides one which is easily avoided. The two final cutscenes both hint at possible future Crysis games however there is really no need for another one set after the events of 3 as there is almost nowhere the series could go from here. Although the final battle is stupidly easy and the ending is a little cliché, it does tie up the plot rather nicely leaving only a few questions unanswered, mainly to do with Psycho though.
Gameplay in Crysis 3 is near enough the same as Crysis 2, however a few small changes have been made. Instead of using that sparkly stuff the Ceph dropped when they died to upgrade your suit you now use upgrade modules which are hidden around the environments, these can be collected up to purchase abilities such as faster reload, more health, longer stealth etc. with four categories to choose from and around 5 or 6 abilities in each category. However only 1 from each category can be active at any one time meaning you must tactically decide what things will benefit most in the current situation. These modules also upgrade themselves if you use them a lot, in my case I buffed my health, reload speed, hacking assist and sprint speed and I never needed to swap them out because I was just so quick and had so much health. So it is a feature that can be as essential as you need it to be depending on your preferred play method. It does remove almost all the variety out of the game though, which for a series that prided itself on gameplay variety is a big downer.
The game also introduces a weapon you can't un-equip, the Hunter Bow. The bow is easily the best weapon in the game in terms of look, usefulness and overall power. It kills 90% of C.E.L.L in 1 shot, plus explosive & thermal tips are priceless assets against Ceph. It also doesn’t disable your cloak when you fire it. The problem with it is it's so overpowered that it completely unbalances the gameplay, sue the ammo is scarce, but steel tipped arrows can be recovered from corpses if you can find them meaning you will rarely run out if you are clever about what you shoot at.
Hacking is new but there isn’t much to say about it besides it can sometimes give you an upper hand in battle and unlock some secret containers, but nothing that is game changing.
So what about the graphics, it's why we are here right? For those that went and spent thousands on a new PC just to run this game in anticipation you will be disappointed as to how similar it looks to Crysis 2. Lighting has been marginally improved and environment detail is slightly better. But besides this there is next to no difference, you wont even be able to tell the difference unless you have the two games running simultaneously and next to each other on the very highest settings. But this isn’t to say that it doesn’t look great, I mean lets face it its Crysis. But the biggest problem with this though is that Crysis 1 still remains the best looking title in the franchise and that was made in 2007!
Environments are once again large and full of greenery making the light bounce off nearly every surface giving it a 'fake' beauty because as soon as you are in a dark environment is just looks like every other AAA FPS out there with some occasionally muddy textures and boring grey colour palettes. For Xbox 360 owners if you don’t have the game installed on your hard drive you will suffer excruciatingly long load times and some frankly unacceptable texture popping that can often take several minutes to load in at times, however the game is only 5.1GB to install so its not much of a sacrifice to vastly improve performance.
Sound design in Crysis 3 is just as poor as its predecessors. Overly distorted and unpleasant for the ears throughout the entire game. Guns still sound like the Halo 3 assault rifle and the soundtrack is either always too quiet or too loud. Make sure you have either crappy headphones or cheap speakers when playing this game or it could well ruin your fine equipment because of its overly distorted nature. How Crytek & EA allow such atrocious sound design to pass through into the final product is beyond me.
The game also introduces a weapon you can't un-equip, the Hunter Bow. The bow is easily the best weapon in the game in terms of look, usefulness and overall power. It kills 90% of C.E.L.L in 1 shot, plus explosive & thermal tips are priceless assets against Ceph. It also doesn’t disable your cloak when you fire it. The problem with it is it's so overpowered that it completely unbalances the gameplay, sue the ammo is scarce, but steel tipped arrows can be recovered from corpses if you can find them meaning you will rarely run out if you are clever about what you shoot at.
Hacking is new but there isn’t much to say about it besides it can sometimes give you an upper hand in battle and unlock some secret containers, but nothing that is game changing.
So what about the graphics, it's why we are here right? For those that went and spent thousands on a new PC just to run this game in anticipation you will be disappointed as to how similar it looks to Crysis 2. Lighting has been marginally improved and environment detail is slightly better. But besides this there is next to no difference, you wont even be able to tell the difference unless you have the two games running simultaneously and next to each other on the very highest settings. But this isn’t to say that it doesn’t look great, I mean lets face it its Crysis. But the biggest problem with this though is that Crysis 1 still remains the best looking title in the franchise and that was made in 2007!
Environments are once again large and full of greenery making the light bounce off nearly every surface giving it a 'fake' beauty because as soon as you are in a dark environment is just looks like every other AAA FPS out there with some occasionally muddy textures and boring grey colour palettes. For Xbox 360 owners if you don’t have the game installed on your hard drive you will suffer excruciatingly long load times and some frankly unacceptable texture popping that can often take several minutes to load in at times, however the game is only 5.1GB to install so its not much of a sacrifice to vastly improve performance.
Sound design in Crysis 3 is just as poor as its predecessors. Overly distorted and unpleasant for the ears throughout the entire game. Guns still sound like the Halo 3 assault rifle and the soundtrack is either always too quiet or too loud. Make sure you have either crappy headphones or cheap speakers when playing this game or it could well ruin your fine equipment because of its overly distorted nature. How Crytek & EA allow such atrocious sound design to pass through into the final product is beyond me.
One last thing to note about Crysis 3 is that it suffers from a game breaking bug that crops up in a handful of copies. Unfortunately one of the faulty copies is one I own. This affects all 3 platforms and occurs in the final boss battle of all places. The game will freeze your console or close itself on PC if you die during the final battle. It will then freeze or close itself if you complete the final battle meaning that you cannot actually finish the game. Though this is likely to be patched it is definitely something you should think about before you go buying the game as the copy you pick up could be one of the faulty ones. The campaign is also not overly long either, I completed it on normal in just 4 and a half hours, Supersoldier (the hardest difficulty) will reportedly last you just over 5 if you can get into the swing of things making it one of the shortest FPS's in recent memory.
Extending the lifespan is the multiplayer which is packed with gamemodes and allows you to rank up to level 50, then reset back to 1 and do it again if you so wish. Most of the gamemodes are ones returning from Crysis 2 such as Instant Action, but game modes such as the much talked about Hunter mode are new and are wickedly fun to play. However Crysis 3 cannot offer a polished experience. It is often unbalanced and the map design isn’t all that great meaning that within a few months very few people will still be playing due to games such as Call of Duty and Halo providing similar but much better experiences to Crysis 3.
In all Crysis 3 is below average. Its nothing special and something that can easily be skipped if you aren’t all that excited by it already. It is a game for fans only, it will probably make most fans turn up their noses and go back to the originals too. I cannot justify the £40 price tag for a game that will last you a week or two tops so I suggest a pre-owned purchase if you can wait for the price to drop, luckily there is no online pass to worry about which was very surprising for an EA game.
Extending the lifespan is the multiplayer which is packed with gamemodes and allows you to rank up to level 50, then reset back to 1 and do it again if you so wish. Most of the gamemodes are ones returning from Crysis 2 such as Instant Action, but game modes such as the much talked about Hunter mode are new and are wickedly fun to play. However Crysis 3 cannot offer a polished experience. It is often unbalanced and the map design isn’t all that great meaning that within a few months very few people will still be playing due to games such as Call of Duty and Halo providing similar but much better experiences to Crysis 3.
In all Crysis 3 is below average. Its nothing special and something that can easily be skipped if you aren’t all that excited by it already. It is a game for fans only, it will probably make most fans turn up their noses and go back to the originals too. I cannot justify the £40 price tag for a game that will last you a week or two tops so I suggest a pre-owned purchase if you can wait for the price to drop, luckily there is no online pass to worry about which was very surprising for an EA game.
STORY: 3/10
GAMEPLAY: 7/10
PRESENTATION: 8/10
LIFESPAN: 5/10
SCORE: 5/10
Crysis 3 is a game you will forget about in a matter of days, it has no staying power and does nothing new, it is merely a instalment in a series that has died before it even got going. If you want a real Crysis experience, just get the original game.