Crysis 3 Review

Let's get this clear up front: Crysis 3 is a better first-person shooter than Crysis 2 in almost every way. Gameplay is more robust and varied, the storytelling is more mature, and it's often visually stunning. Unfortunately, it's also not very ambitious: it leans heavily on ideas already established by better games, and as such isn't an especially remarkable experience. Its reach might exceed its grasp in a few key areas, but Crysis 3 is still a largely enjoyable excuse to take a trip to post-apocalyptic New York.



That might not be immediately evident upon starting the campaign, however: the first couple of levels feel rote and uninspired, and they're not helped by the feeling that the story is being picked up in medias res. Rather than provide sufficient exposition to make it clear as to what occurred in the 24-year gap between Crysis 2 and 3, you're simply thrown into the first mission and expected to piece together the narrative of Prophet's struggle against CELL and the Ceph as you proceed. Text and audio logs provide some clues here (although the audio logs frustratingly make us sit in a menu the whole time they're playing), and the storyline is at least largely self-contained. A weak start hurts, though, because at only six hours long, Crysis 3 doesn't have a lot of time to waste.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

While it does get better, that storyline never becomes particularly unique or innovative. It liberally cribs its tropes from games like Deus Ex and Half-Life 2, mixing up "immensely powerful aliens want to destroy mankind" with "evil megacorporation wishes to rule the world," peppered with a dash of "what does it mean to be human." The script attempts to evoke a sense of profundity that it can never quite get a hold on, but events are presented with a more mature sensibility than you might expect based on the last two Crysis games.


Gameplay is going to be pretty familiar to anyone who's played a Crysis game: this is a fairly traditional shooter, juiced up by a suit that gives you superhuman strength, speed, and durability, plus the power of invisibility. You're a posthuman badass, to be sure, but your powers have their limits, and you'll constantly be managing your limited energy reserves as you play. Crysis 3 feels like it hits a sweet spot between the blink-and-you'll-miss-it amount of energy you were given in Crysis and the run-a-kilometer-while-cloaked power level of Crysis 2: you're capable of doing amazing things with your nanosuit, but a poor tactical approach will leave you exposed and vulnerable.

The Year Of The Bow Continues Apace

There are a few good tweaks to the core gameplay, though, most notably a simple hacking tool that lets you turn turrets and other computerized equipment against their owners. Again, this isn't a system that's particularly unique, drawing as it does on precedents set by Deus Ex and BioShock, but it does help reward you for doing something other than just run and gun our way through the levels. If you are interested in running and gunning, you'll find that most of the weapons here are holdovers from Crysis 2, although you are given a new compound bow early on, archery apparently being a bit of a fad in games of late. It comes with a variety of ammunition that allows you to adapt to the varying circumstances that you run up against (airburst rounds work well against enemies in cover, explosive rounds are good for taking out crowds, etc.), but constantly shifting between ammo types winds up being a bit of a chore, which led me to simply rely on my more traditional assault rifle and shotgun for most encounters.


A stealthy approach to any given encounter is often preferable to simply shooting everything that moves, as enemy reinforcements come in droves after you expose yourself. The broad level design does a great job of encouraging that with plenty of alternate routes by which to bypass groups of enemies or approach them from a superior position. In a welcome change, these options are no longer ham-fistedly called out on Prophet's visor as they were in Crysis 2, meaning that you have to actually explore and probe an area to find them.

A Better Breed Of Alien

One of Crysis 3's biggest strengths is in the design of its alien Ceph antagonists. Previous Crysis games have repetitive alien enemies, with Crysis 2 effectively just making most of its alien foes beefed-up bullet-resistant humanoids. Crysis 3 opens up this design and throws a wide variety of Ceph at us, forcing me to adapt my approach to each encounter based on which aliens I was lined up against rather than simply wading into combat, guns ablaze. Stalkers, for example, can't be tagged with your visor (which would tell you where they are at all times), and will use brush and tall grass to assist their hit-and-run tactics, whereas the flame-spewing Scorchers can only be damaged from behind, forcing you to lure them near explosives and take them down indirectly.


The AI also does a great job at creating believable enemy behavior, especially with the CELL soldiers. They'll throw grenades to try to flush you out of hiding spots, utilize overwatch tactics to provide support for each other as they advance, and stick to cover when fired upon. The AI can be fooled, of course, but again, this generally happens in ways that are credible: it's fun to expose your position to a group of guards, lure them out of their hiding spot, then cloak and backtrack to bypass them entirely while they search for you.

The Post-apocalypse Has Never Looked This Good

Tactics like that are possible largely because the levels here are thankfully much, much bigger than those in Crysis 2, and are often breathtakingly gorgeous to boot. Decades of decay have left New York in shambles, and Crytek's artists have done a wonderful job of creating an environment that feels both inhospitable and queerly beautiful: deer frolic through overgrown streets, the lower levels of skyscrapers have been eroded by floods, and tall grasses have overtaken many of the open areas you come across. What's more, it all looks great even with a midrange machine and at modest graphical settings. My Core i7-920 and Radeon HD 6950 kept up at a relatively constant 40+ fps, with only occasional dips when large groups of enemies were on screen.


If the single-player story draws inspiration from some of the better narrative FPS games of the past decade, it shouldn't be all that surprising to find that Crysis 3's multiplayer is deeply indebted to Call of Duty. Perks, killstreaks, loadout adjustments -- most of the classic CoD features pop up in some form, albeit with different names. The gametypes are diverse enough to keep things interesting as you rack up your kills, though, with the most unique being the Hunter mode, which sets permanently cloaked nanosuit wielders against a larger group of highly vulnerable C.E.L.L. operatives. The twist here is that each operative that's killed respawns on the other team, tasked with tracking down their former comrades before the timer runs out. Making it through a round as an operative is a highly tense experience, and there's a real feeling of accomplishment that arrives when you actually manage to survive the predations of a far superior enemy force.

Evolution, Not Revolution

Other gameplay modes include CTF, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and the usual objective-based fare: nothing about it is very surprising, but it still manages to be a lot of fun, and Crysis 3 does offer gameplay you can't get in any CoD thanks to the cat-and-mouse roughhousing that naturally arises when the bulk of the opponents you face are often invisible.

Crysis 3 is a self-assured but largely unambitious game, content to refine the experience of the previous games in the series without deviating very far from the standard that they set. It takes itself a bit more seriously than its plot probably warrants, sure, and it willfully throws out references to games that are far more memorable than it ultimately winds up being, but to its credit, it seems quite comfortable to focus on execution rather than the revolution that the first Crysis shot for. Considering that it delivers a fun, polished experience, it's hard to fault it for that.