Crysis 3 Review – Is The Game Too Choppy To Be Fun?

The Gist

When the first screenshots and trailers for Crysis 3 started to trickle out from developer Crytek, fans of the sci-fi FPS were spellbound. Graphically speaking, Crysis has always set the benchmark to which all other shooters aspire, and the newly announced stealth bow only served to entice us all the more.

Players assume the role of Prophet, the very same super-soldier who took out those evil Koreans in the first game and who put a bullet in his brain moments into the second. Turns out that while the strong but silent Alcatraz was taking on the evil alien Ceph in NYC, Prophet was just hibernating deep within the suit itself. And now he’s back in a sort of ghost-in-the-shell type of scenario and he is out to save the world.

CELL, the mercenary group from Crysis 2, has the entire planet in the grips of its economic/energy industry-driven madness. All energy now comes from this mega-conglomerate, and those who cannot pay their bills wind up working off their debt in cruel and unusual ways. The good news? Most of the Ceph seem to have disappeared and a small group of insurgents (led by none other than the first game’s Psycho) are out to topple CELL and return freedom to humanity. Things are pretty dire, but Prophet is nothing short of incredible and now he’s on the case!

The Good

This is one of the best looking games you’ll play this generation. You will enter the Liberty Dome, a massive means of containment that has left NYC covered with more plant life than we’ve seen since Enslaved. It’s a clever device, especially in such a well-known location. Familiar landmarks have become dilapidated ruins and the level of detail is nothing short of pleasantly overwhelming. A lot of it is due to the brilliant lighting and particle effects that make each new area come to life.

The campaign plays out a lot more like the first game and brings the multiple means of execution that was so highly touted in Crysis 2 to staggering new heights. Oh sure, the second game constantly told us there were multiple paths to explore, but given the narrow battlefields that dominated most missions, this promise wound up being little more than a superficial means to justify multiple plays. Crysis 3, however, takes the open-world/sandbox style of development and infuses it with a healthy dose of linear structure. Most missions have multiple objectives and it is (mostly) up to you how to play them out. Whether or not this actually fleshes out the experience is up to each gamer, but it goes a long way toward varying the action.

These are the best, tightest, and most responsive controls since Call of Duty and shine especially in the area of upgrades and weapon customization. By simply equipping the weapon of your choice you can hold down back/select and choose from a variety of scopes, barrel attachments, and various other accoutrements. Suit upgrades are similarly applied and, once you’ve unlocked them all, can be mapped to the face buttons for a quick and tactical means of adapting to any combat situation.

Once again, the visor returns! This sweet little piece of tech is a strangely addictive means of both marking the locations of enemies or waypoints, and using a newly implemented timing-based hacking mini-game that allows you to turn landmines or turrets on the very enemies they’re supposed to protect. You’ll get into hacking to open up new paths of traversal, but you’ll return because it’s honestly a fun little game.

The new stealth bow becomes an absolute joy to use. So much so that you’ll sometimes wonder what the point of using other weapons might be.

Continue reading the Crysis 3 review after the jump…